149. American Chain Restaurants

            There are certain things that everyone uses out of convenience but they might grumble a little bit about it. For me that’s chain restaurants. Sometimes I grumble about them not being healthy enough. But, of course, that’s not always true because there are plenty of choices. In reality, the consistency of American chain restaurants is great comfort. I love the fact that I can pick up a sub sandwich with some chips and an icy cold drink and picnic it on the spur of the moment. I don’t have to go into a chain restaurant and pore over a menu asking questions of the waiter because I already know what to order before I even open the door. Of course that’s not always what I want, but when I want easy comfort an American chain restaurant is there to fill that role.

            There’s no doubt that it’s a little disconcerting to drive the streets of a European city to find a KFC crammed into an old Tudor building, but after a few days of mushy peas, dried out roast dinners and cold “jacket potatoes” (we Yanks call them baked) or soggy schnitzel, a nice crispy chicken leg with a biscuit and honey and a coke with ice is a real treat. It just seems wrong that when you order a coke and specify that you would like ice, the waiter returns with a warm coke and a single, rapidly melting ice cube. So, yes, I think a KFC in Zurich seems wrong but I’m not going to complain about that coke at TGI Friday’s in Bristol when they set a proper icy coke in front of me with a slice of lemon. And, yes, of course, I appreciate the quaint pubs and the restaurants of Europe, but sometimes it’s just nice to have a moment on the Grand Canal to collect yourself and get over the fact that you would have saved five bucks at the pizza place had you ordered a bottle of wine instead of said coke that was warm without ice. No, I wouldn’t go to Pizza Hut in Rome and I really don’t think they should have them there, but it must not just be Americans looking that comfort in knowing what’s at an American chain restaurant. And I confess to having stopped by a Burger King in Oxford after maneuvering my way around a zillion international touring teenagers to get a nice icy coke that had no guarantee of a free refill, always bemoaning the fact that they didn’t offer root beer.

            I realize that American food is too packaged, too everywhere sometimes, but I also realize that there is great comfort in a nice biscuit with sausage gravy that you can’t really seem to find anywhere outside of North America, because who would eat gravy on their Oreos? (Biscuit in British English is that American hard dry cookie sort of thing.) And the comfort of knowing exactly what you are getting is what the American chain restaurant offers. I may be the first to grumble about the McDonald’s in Exeter’s city centre being a crowded mess, but I might also wait twenty minutes at lunch time to order my kids a Quarter Pounder with fries at that same crowded McDonald’s while wondering how such a place could ever be considered fast food.

            It’s no different here at home. When I don’t know what they serve at Mabel’s diner in Detroit and my other option is Burger King when I’ve been craving a grilled burger, the choice is obvious. I’ll try Mabel’s when I’m not tired, when I’m ready to experiment, when Burger King sounds too ordinary. But I’m so thankful for the American chain restaurant for its comfort and knowing what I will get.

148. Salt Water Taffy

            Summertime is the time of year when Americans go on vacation. This year is different because we need to shelter in place to stop the spread of the Corona virus so fewer people are taking those trips. Of course, we are Americans and it is built into our national character to bristle at someone (God forbid, the government!) telling us what to do, so people who haven’t seen the devastation of this virus—the people who don’t believe in science, the people who have to see it to believe it, the doubting Thomases, the people who think it’s the flu, the people who believe you are a liberal wuss if you wear a mask—seem to be going out and spreading the devastation of their disbelief to the masses as the numbers and death tolls increase. But, lest I digress too much, it is vacation time in America. One of the best parts of a vacation for me is indulging my sweet tooth and I don’t eat salt water taffy many other times than summer vacation.

            Since I won’t be taking any vacations this year aside from some daytrips and maybe an overnight camp out (where I am alone) I guess I’m just going to have to imagine walking a boardwalk in Seaside, or even Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene, and stopping in a candy store where they make fudge, serve ice cream and pull salt water taffy. I love a nice chocolate taffy, soft and wrapped in wax paper. Fresh huckleberry or blueberry is also a luxurious escape from everything but heaven. People are milling about on the streets of that mountain town where the heat is dry and short lived of a summer afternoon. Sunglassed mothers are pushing chubby little babies in strollers while their bearded, tank topped husbands are walking beside them holding the hands of an older child gazing into the windows of a sweet shop. At this point my indulgence runs toward the soft taffy with just a little black spot in the center. Licorice is the flavor I can buy that will be mine. The kids won’t walk off with more than one of those before realizing it’s not for them. Or maybe a spicy cinnamon starburst center. How do they get those designs so perfectly centered in those little candies?

            I can see the machines stretching and pulling the taffy reminding me of winters as a child when family and friends would gather for a taffy pull. It makes you forget the sunglasses you’ve perched on top of your head and you enter another world. Maybe now you’re out in an Adirondack chair in a hayfield at the base of one of the Green or White Mountains of New England enjoying the breeze of an afternoon as you indulge in a little maple gem of a taffy you just purchased at some little shop with a quaint name like Sleepy Hollow or something like that. Their flavors in that sweet, chewy stickiness can take you anywhere in this country of ours without really needing to go any further than your back porch. Do you feel that relentless sun in the heaviness of humidity from a thunderstorm as you try to gain relief by putting your feet in the warm bathtub of the Gulf of Mexico? The only possible relief is that little Key Lime taffy to get away from the oppression of a Florida summer.

            You know, I think I can get to all those places I’m thinking about with a quick masked trip to the grocery store where I can find a nice bag of salt water taffy (probably from Salt Lake City) and I will be able to transport myself anywhere with just a quick taste of somewhere else. I really love a vacation in a staycation bag of salt water taffy. I’ll be saving some money this year…

147. Sharing Ideas and Information

            I am an educator who has been teaching students from the ages of eleven through adulthood for over 35 years. Of course, my profession is disseminating what I know to others but it’s also a process of learning a great deal from my students and other people. I love that and how we do it here in the US. No, I don’t really like the trained poodle hoop jumping that I have to do to get certificates or proof of training, but there is a little fun in learning shortcuts. And I love sharing ideas and learning how to do new things.

            This past year when the pandemic shut school down, I had to learn a great deal about teaching remotely. I’m 58 and have never taken any classes remotely except for a few video training courses that have more often than not seemed like time wasters—poodle hoops. As an English teacher who has always specialized in reading and reading instruction, I quickly learned that for my high school English courses I needed to be focusing on literature and writing because those are the key components of what students are expected to take away from those courses. The quickest way to get literature across to my students who might struggle with reading is to simplify how they read. So I lead them to audio books. Short cuts do not prevent you from learning, they just need to be recognized as short cuts and many of the incidentals—the emotional attachments—you would gain might be lost. Duh! How could someone who has taught for so many years not know that? I did know it, but crystalizing it to the exact skills lost through my teaching was not something I could have articulated so well before this era of remote learning. It’s another thing I’ve learned: how to articulate why face to face learning is so much better than remote learning. Nevertheless, I love that we have ways to communicate and share ideas during this time of physical distancing.

            I think that it is also true that we can learn remotely from the people of the past. Of course I think that! I teach literature. Our ancestors have so much to tell us about living. The American ideals began hundreds of years ago and they were expressly written for us to see and to emulate. The very handwriting of men and women from the past is still visible for us to see, just as are paintings and physical structures which we live in and conduct our business and gatherings. To read a journal or letter from hundreds of years ago in the very building in which it was written can carry you back to a particular time and that presence of humanity from such a long time ago is both inspiring and haunting. I love that.

            I love how ideas are exchanged and how we learn. The importance of communication and leaving record of how to do things, how people feel in certain spaces, how they have felt—all of that is so very inspiring to me. As I grow older I know that what I do now does have an impact on others. Yesterday I ran the last five miles of a fifteen-mile training run with one of my cross-country athletes who is training for and running a marathon for his senior project. I know he got the idea of doing that from me and running those last difficult miles with him is such a privilege because I know he will accomplish it. I know how he feels. Sharing that in a way that can’t be fully articulated is an honor and a joy that I feel privileged to do. How we share our ideas and our living with one another is very important. It is how we love one another.

146. Immigrants

            We are a nation of immigrants. Research shows that even the native tribes are immigrants. All of us are descended from people who had to leave their homelands for various reasons. It’s not clear why all the migration to the Americas occurred—some from climate change, some from religious persecution, some for lust of wealth, some from innovation, and some through coercion and force. What we have brought to this land is the best and worst from wherever we came and we have collected it here on a foundation of ideals and a belief in opportunity. Many have been fortunate to find those opportunities while others have been consistently denied.

            I love that we have cultural bounty all around us even in the little rural town where I live. If I drive a few miles to the north I’m on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. A few miles south I am in one of two land grant university towns where (in healthier times) I can mingle with people of African, Asian, European, South and Central American, and Middle Eastern Cultures. I am aware that this is unique of such a rural area and that many of us are pocketed into regions of our own cultural identities or separated from those cultural identities. But it only takes a little effort to get out and see the various shades of America available for all of us.

            Currently immigration into the US is a problem because so many people want to come here to escape the violence and unrest in their own countries. They want to come here for all of the same reasons that our ancestors came here. Right now, we have an elected government that is far less welcoming than previous governments have been, though it would certainly be unfair to characterize any of our governments as welcoming beyond certain selective predispositions. Right now, what we are doing to prospective immigrants on our southern border is inhumane and needs to change but that will not happen until we change governments at the election. When justice does not prevail, we must fight back and I have been known to do that often simply by voicing my opinion, peacefully protesting when necessary, and voting.

            As a nation of immigrants and as the son of a long line of immigrants and as a Christian I believe in the humanity of all and I want to do all I can to promote that. So even though I am sheltering in place I will continue to support the variety of cultural identities that make up the fabric of this nation through my custom, through my profession and through my voice. I believe in the immigrant and the promise of our nation. There is no reason to have a statue in our most frequented harbor that says, “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” if we don’t believe it.

            We just celebrated our 244^th birthday as a nation and now we are reckoning with a dark history that is over four hundred years old and continues to blot our existence. We must continue to grapple with that and rectify the wrongs while accepting the huddled masses to the shores of liberty. I know I am an idealist, but, again, as a son of immigrants and a proponent of compassion, I love this nation of immigrants and I hold to every ideal of liberty that goes along with it.

145. American Ideals

            “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Those are the words that were set forth on July 4, 1776 as a declaration of independence from Great Britain and an established set of ideals for the thirteen British colonies of North America. They were posted everywhere for the new Americans to see, and they were, in fact, a lofty set of ideals for humanity to aspire toward. The truth is that we hardly ever come close to those aspirations, but we must keep trying.

            It is self-evident that from the very beginning we were lacking in attaining these ideals. The words “all men” is very sexist, but typically now we interpret it as all humanity. It is also a huge irony that several of the men who signed the document were slave owners. And we have grappled with those problems from the inception of that document. “All men” means what? Who are men? Our problem is the interpretation of the word men. Is men synonymous with humanity? Our sisters would say yes, yet we have tried for centuries to say it is not, but it is simply males. Apparently, the originators thought only of white males because they continued to enslave their black brethren. They also set forth to take lands from the native Americans because they were brown, often illiterate, and therefore less than “men.”

            And what about the cognitively impaired? Is someone who can’t verbally communicate with others anymore exalted than a beast? Should people confined to wheelchairs really be allowed to enter buildings? Should these degenerate creatures be allowed to procreate? You may begin to see a pattern here that shows how we infringe upon the liberty of all men. But we did achieve a milestone thirty years ago in regard to Americans with disabilities and said yes to the questions above with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. That’s not very long ago.

            I think it’s clear that all men will not agree on what liberties or pursuits of happiness others can engage in. I think it is still a wonderful ideal that we must continue to grapple with. I think we should evaluate our progress as a nation every year at this time. I believe we have to engage in the discussion through legal avenues, through peaceful protests when we believe our ideals are not being adequately purposed. We must not shut down the conversation, but keep the dialogue open. I believe that that is our liberty and our pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is a journey and it is our unalienable right. We cannot shut down that pursuit because we might disagree with someone. We can’t keep saying things like “the Bible says it so that’s the way it is,” because clearly how one person interprets the Bible can be quite different from another person. And clearly the Bible isn’t a starting point because not all are Christian or Jewish. We have to continue on our path of seeking “liberty and justice for all,” because we believe “all men are created equal.”

            For two hundred and forty-four years we have engaged in this debate. From the inception of our country we have gradually allowed others into the conversation and only for one hundred years have we fully included women in this debate. We have sought to open voices and we have sought to shut them down. We have sought to hear others voices and other times we have sought to consider them cacophony. Every single human being has done these things so that we bandy the shuttlecock back and forth. I am thankful for these ideals. I am not ready to quit pursuing my happiness and that of my brothers and sisters because I hold these truths, while complicated, to be self-evident: All are created equal.

144. Dark History

            There is no doubt that as a country we have a very dark history. Colonialism was based in exploitation or escape from that very thing and those evils are our ancestry. Our people either came with the goal of exploiting a new land, escaping terrible persecutions with no place left to go, being forced here in chains and irons, or having all of that terror come to the land of their birth. All that heaviness increased as time went on. Resentment from slaves clashed with already brewing resentment of colonists and natives driven by greed, fear, or both. The idyllic Pilgrim Thanksgiving feast was probably nothing close to the pageantry of a grade school reenactment.

            All of that seething darkness of humanity is still with us, but the glimmering light of hope, redemption, and prosperity is also still with us. Out of the darkness of oppression these fearless groups of people left their distant shores to come live on what they saw as a vast wilderness only to believe they somehow had individual rights to claim it as their own and to subdue it to their own desires. Some held beliefs of religious liberty and purpose but they completely overstepped their bounds by refusing to understand the new people they encountered, labeling them as savage with all the heaviness of that word merely because they were different. It was ignorance and stubborn indifference to the great similarities that ALL human beings share. Not two hundred years into all this greed and ignorance that Britain had staked claim to, the colonists declared themselves free of the laws and taxes that Britain was imposing on them, stating that “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” What beautiful words to declare, yet how ironic that the very men who penned and conceived them were, in fact, slave owners. From the inception of the discovery of these new continents by Europeans, human darkness and human hope have striven to create better things. I believe the light is overcoming the darkness.

            The problem is that we are still struggling. We are okay with things being off kilter as long as we and those around us are safe. That’s where we fall short of our pledge for liberty and justice for ALL. It would be wrong to say that we don’t want and aspire to that goal, but it is also wrong to say that we really work for it. Contentment has bred hypocrisy amongst us and we don’t help ourselves by shaping our narrative in a way that ignores, even protects, the ugly darkness that we all carry.

            The dark history of the United States is the dark history of the world. We must grapple with that history and stop wallowing in individual contentment to achieve the ideals that we have been aspiring to for over four hundred years. Only if we really believe that black and brown lives matter can we begin to understand that glib, content, sweeping-under-the-rug-all-our-dirt idea of all lives mattering. We cannot abandon our history, but we must cling to the very hope that has brought us here across stormy seas through a revolution and civil war to this place we are now. I am proud of our ideals and I want to continue to work to achieve them. It is out of these ashes that we will rise. I will not give up on the American dream.

143. Friendships

            There’s certainly nothing uniquely American about friendship, but it is something I am extremely grateful for at every juncture in my life. Right now, during quarantine, it is especially important for all of us to maintain our friendships. My main point of this blog is to enumerate the good things about America and living in America, and there is, by far, no better aspect to life anywhere than friendship. So why not focus on friendship as something I am grateful for in America? I will say this about myself: I am someone who will stay a friend always. I don’t always choose friends based on any particularity beyond the ability to unite over some commonality. It may be something as mundane as hair color or the fact that we both know someone and are friends with that person. Of course, the deep friendships come from shared experiences. I have made hundreds of friends based upon the fact that I am a teacher. I can’t have a kid in my class for a year or more and learn so much about them that I won’t befriend them. Yes, of course we grow older and apart by distance, but I seldom forget the bonds we have made. My best friends are also other teachers. Those are people in whom I can confide my struggles and hopes about a plethora of students and how to work with them and their backgrounds, whether we share those students or not.

            I make many friends out of curiosity—I see someone in church that I’ve never seen before and I introduce myself and find out as much as I can about them. I strike up a conversation with someone I see often at the grocery store, perhaps a clerk or a box boy, and gradually we get to know each other. Friendships often develop gradually through time but sometimes they form almost instantaneously. I cherish both formations and the bonds they create.

            Reading books is a way I often develop friendships, and I don’t mean the imaginary ones with the characters. I mean the friendships that are formed when you meet someone who also likes the same books you do. If you both like the book there must be something about the other person that you will gravitate toward because of that shared interest.

            I have also made plenty of friends because of the sports I participate in. I have running buddies, hiking buddies, and biking buddies. I love those people just because we have shared so much in not only the activities, but the deep conversations that evolve out of shared effort, shared scenery, and shared proximity. It has always been my belief that you can’t not be friends with people who work together with you.

            And food brings people together. Not only the breaking of bread together, but the act of cooking together. Learn what people like to eat and make it together if you can, or have them teach you how to make it. The stories that come from food and the associations will knit your bond so that you will remember them whenever you eat that food. Their memories will integrate with your memories and you will form a friendship around something as simple as a specific type of chees on a specific sandwich or a special way of putting clotted cream on a scone at that specific tea shop in that very unique seaside town.

            And sometimes friendships develop through very ugly situations that someone helps you with or that you help them with, especially if you were at first in opposition to one another. Trauma is eased through shared experiences and the ability to help each other through it. And never forget to reach out to those people who you know will help you to heal, maybe just by their smile and their knowledge of you. Now is the time to strengthen and create those friendships. There is nothing more wonderful than our shared humanity. I cherish it, and am grateful for it.