It’s been a quiet day around here. It’s New Year’s Eve. I got a great message from a former resident who has started his own Psychiatry Consultation Fellowship training program in Bangkok, Thailand. Dr. Paul Thisayakorn and his wife are welcoming 2022 with their 2 lovely children and hoping 2022 will be a better year, as we are. The Covid pandemic has been hard around the world.
Paul also looks forward to establishing a C-L Psychiatry academic society in Thailand in the coming year. Paul did his psychiatry residency at University of Iowa and his C-L Psychiatry fellowship in Cleveland. Sena and I wish him and his family all the best in the new year.
Today was quiet, but tomorrow the big snowstorm will come. We’ll be digging out all day because the forecast is for 5-8 inches, high wind gusts, and ice. It’s Iowa, after all.
But for tonight we’ll take a cup of kindness and say goodbye to 2021.
And if you like MacLean’s version of Auld Lang Syne above, you might have a listen to another with the Scottish lyrics translated.
Yesterday, Sena and I visited the James Alan McPherson Park. The Iowa City Council renamed it in his honor last month; it was formerly called Creekside Park. There were compelling reasons for the name change. He was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his collection of short stories, Elbow Room in 1978, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1968, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, and was a permanent faculty member for thirty years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, among other notable career achievements. He was 72 when he died in 2016 of complications of pneumonia.
McPherson was a longtime resident of Iowa City and was revered by his students. Colleagues described him as the “moral center of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop” and even the “moral center of the world.” Despite his stunning achievements, he was shy and often barely spoke above a whisper in the classroom. He lived in the general neighborhood where the park is located. We never got a chance to meet him.
We are reading his books, though.
The park is located at 1878 Seventh Ave Ct and sits on a little over 2 acres. It was empty except for the occasional walker on the trail. People were friendly. It seems hardly distinguishable from the neighborhood surrounding it and blends into the homes, hugs the meandering creek and adjoining trail, and seems held in a protective embrace by the homes bordering it. A new park sign and a memorial plaque will be installed later this summer.
We saw a rich variety of birds, in fact more than we’ve seen in a while.
We get a sense that everyone is welcome there. There are 6 parking spaces. You can imagine that limited parking makes the place a treasured possession of the immediate neighborhood. But people we encounter there make us feel that it belongs to all of us. Even a sign leaning against a house alongside the trail made that clear. We’ll be back.
We got walloped by that blizzard I mentioned yesterday. It left about 5-8 inches at least with a gift mountain about waist high on one side of our driveway left by one of the city plows. Later in the day another plow gifted us another driveway plug, not as tall but wetter and heavier.
This morning we shoveled hard and it must have showed. Three of our neighbors came over with their snow blowers to help dig us out. We were very grateful for their kindness. One of them must have been up before 5 AM to get started. Another powered her way through a good chunk of our driveway. Yet a third neighbor helped clear the gift mountain and more.
I think I may have got in the way a few times because I felt a little guilty about them doing so much work with their machines. I felt compelled to sneak in and scoop something because I felt terrible just standing there watching them.
In the afternoon we had to get back outside to clear the second driveway plug left by the second city plow. Our driveway had drifted in about to my hips. It took us a while to dig out.
Some have speculated about whether shovel people take unfair advantage of the generosity of snow blower people. After all, we tend to look kind of pathetic, so they probably take pity on us.
There might be an expectation in some neighborhoods for snow blower people to contribute to the community by being willing to go the extra mile and clear driveways for shovel people. I could find only one serious article on the internet about this, “Is There a Social Code for Snow Removal?” on the Scientific American web site.
I’ve not heard of shovel people coming to help snow blower people, but it happened this afternoon. After Sena and I cleared our snowdrifts, we visited the three neighbors who helped us this morning and scooped out their driveway snow plugs and a little more when we could.
Today is the first day of Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Week and I’m giving a shout-out for acts of kindness as well as the Loving-Kindness meditation. A neighbor with a snowblower helped clear our driveway a couple of weeks ago. A couple of days ago he did the same for his next-door neighbor. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate the city snowplow driver was kind enough to avoid plugging the driveways on our street. No kidding, we watched the snowplow use what was obviously a different plowing technique which left our driveways relatively clear of snow.
The Loving-Kindness meditation is a mindfulness practice that Dr. King would probably have supported. It’s a way to send love to yourself and others, including those with whom you might be in conflict—even your enemies. King might say, “Now is the time” for something like that.
I’m reestablishing my mindfulness and exercise practice after a several month lapse. I first took the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course several years ago through The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. It made a difference in how I approached problem-solving and conflict. I was on autopilot most of the time and wrote a blog post about my experience before and after my mindfulness training experience, “How I left the walking dead for the walking dead meditation.”
Part of that program included instruction on the Loving-Kindness meditation. I’m still a beginner at mindfulness, although my approach to life is still ironically more like the expert’s in Shunryu Suzuki’s quote:
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”–Shunryu Suzuki
I need to keep working on being more open to different ideas, interpretations, and ways of getting things done—approaching challenges with a beginner’s mind.
One recent challenge is hanging pictures. Sena and I hung a picture yesterday. I wanted to measure everything and she wanted to estimate. She had misgivings about my measurements but went along with it. After the picture was hung, even I had to admit it was not in the right spot. Funny thing, after a short while, she admitted that the misplacement was not that far off and that she was getting used to it. If you’ve ever hung pictures, you know I’m leaving out a lot of the back-and-forth negotiation about how we finally arrived at that middle ground. It involved loving kindness on both sides.
This is just a brief announcement—a Kindness Alert. This past Saturday, we got our first load of snow of the season dumped on us, which meant we had to go out and shovel. Our driveway is pretty big. We don’t have a snowblower. This means we were out there about an hour and a half powering our way through a few inches of wet, heavy snow.
And naturally, that meant the city snowplows plugged in our driveway shortly after we went inside, foolishly congratulating ourselves on a job well done. I think there must be some kind of local ordinance requiring all driveways to be plugged with snow right after the homeowners finish clearing them. I’ve posted about this before.
But then as we watched from our front window, our neighbor interrupted his own snow removal work to clear off our driveway plug and then some. In fact, he used a snowblower and a shovel! He spent considerable time on the job. It was an impressive act of kindness. I remember wanting to rush out in the cold to thank him.
Little did I know that I would have the opportunity to return the favor. Shortly after our neighbor finished, another snow plow rumbled through and dumped more show in our driveway and even spread it around more generously in other places near the curb—and even shoved snow over the curb on the lawn. By that time, the stuff had frozen into small boulders of ice and mud.
I plodded outside again and cleaned it up. Then I noticed that the snowplow driver had also piled more snow on my neighbor’s side. In fact, I did return the favor—sooner than I thought I would.
A big shout-out for my neighbor’s act of kindness!
This is a follow-up post on Frank and his stump grinder estimate from last week (“Stumped”). By the way, he was the only stump grinder to return my call about getting a quote for the job. The name of his business is Corridor Stump Grinding (CSG) and the web page says it all: “We Remove Stumps.” Indeed, they do.
He brought his big rig over yesterday afternoon and chewed up our front yard stump in less than an hour. Frank is friendly, safe on the job, thorough, and offers a senior discount as well as complimentary ink pens with the CSG logo. I highly recommend him.
Frank has been in the stump grinding business for about 4 years and he’s pretty busy, although he’s in his 70s. He was retired for a couple of years before he embarked on this path in his life and now.
He’s also got a pretty good sense of humor and two other qualities are immediately obvious: kindness and respect. He’s proud of his family, a loving husband, father, and grandfather—and a sharp businessman. His Carleton stump grinder cost him tens of thousands of dollars and he’s doing very well.
Frank has had to repair the 21-inch cutting wheel because of obstacles like fence posts, including T-bars—which I’m sure he was glad we had removed prior to his arrival.
We wanted to shake hands after the job was done and we had talked a while. We couldn’t of course, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, Frank doesn’t mind my sharing a few pictures and a video about him and his stump grinder.
Today Sena and I want to make a shout out for a big act of kindness. Back in August, the derecho blew down a maple tree in our front yard, which also led to a concern about the tree right next to our house, which was a lilac.
We cut both down to stumps with a handsaw, a long handle tree trimmer, and a bow saw. We don’t have a chain saw. We planned to hire a handyman who does own a chainsaw to cut down the stumps.
We were outside, laboring over the lilac with the bow saw. We shared the bow saw. Come to think of it, I’m pretty good about sharing a bow saw, especially when I’ve been using it enough to notice muscle pain in several places I didn’t know I had.
We got the stump down to about 2 feet and were cutting off pathetic little chunks not much bigger than golf balls.
And then I guess a couple of guys on the construction crew working nearby took pity on us because suddenly, they walked over, shouting “Let us help you!” and carrying the biggest concrete saw I’ve ever seen, along with a respectable sledge hammer. The guy operating the concrete saw was the size of a sumo wrestler. His partner was no slouch.
No kidding, “Let us help you!” How could we refuse? What made them do that? Was it the white hair? Was it because they might have seen me yesterday get dirty as a pig cutting tiny pieces off the front yard maple stump? The only way to trim a stump once it gets to a certain height is to roll all over the ground. I have not been that dirty since I was 8 years old after playing king of the hill on a very tall dirt pile.
When I think about the use of a concrete saw almost as tall as I am to cut down a lilac stump, I’m astonished. They brought the tools they had to help us. I’ll never forget that big, friendly “Let us help you!” I’ll never forget their smiling faces.
That lilac stump lasted long a little longer than you’d think, and it was very heavy work. The saw screamed and smoked like it was on fire. It was heavy, but he was heavier and strove to slice the stump as close to the ground as possible. They both took turns swinging the sledge hammer at it—which made me instinctively want to duck. The stump finally let loose.
Immediately, the workers hurried away as we shouted thanks, almost as if they were worried that we might want to pay them—which I certainly considered. They smiled broadly, waving their huge hands.
We are still overwhelmed with gratitude for their kindness. These days, kindness is hard to come by. You look at the news (bad idea), and all you read is somebody is slamming or killing somebody else. I’m not saying you never see or hear about little or big acts of kindness—just that the bad news tends to overshadow the good.
You have to look very hard for an act of kindness. It’s harder to see how we can pay it forward. It doesn’t have to be a big act of kindness. It can be little, like saying “Good morning, how are you?” Even saying “thank you” is an act of kindness. And it’s OK to give a big shout out for any kindness you see—just to let people know it’s still out there.
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