I stopped by the Storyshucker blog today and it sent me on a wave of nostalgia. You really out to stop by Stuart Perkins’ blog and get that feeling. You can read his post, “Baby Bear” in The Local Scoop Magazine. The link is on my menu, so there’s no excuse!
Stuart has his baby bear and, although I don’t have keepsakes going that far back, it sent me back. It reminded me of our last move (I hate moving!). We have this piggy bank we toss loose change into. I can’t remember when we first got it, ages ago. When we moved last year, we tried to get all the coins in it into our bank, but they wouldn’t just count them and deposit the amount—I had to learn how to roll and wrap them myself! That’s not a great memory.
I had a spark plug gap measuring tool and that was back in the day when guys adjusted stuff like that by hand when tuning up their car engines. It’s a good thing I don’t do that anymore. I accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake one time and put a dent in the garage wall. That’s not such a great memory, either.
We used to have an old vintage calculator I used when I was a student at Iowa State University. Memories linked to that are a little better.
We lose track of some things from our past and that can be a good thing occasionally. Guys like Stuart know what’s worth keeping.
I have to admit that I’ve been mis-hearing some of the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, “Lean on Me” for the past fifty-odd years since Bill Withers wrote it. It stayed on the top of the charts for more than 3 weeks back in 1972. That was a special time in my life; and not an easy one.
Back then, you couldn’t just look up song lyrics or anything else for that matter on the world wide web. It didn’t exist yet. I’ve always been prone to mondegreens and I finally found out that I was hearing something different in the verse:
“Please swallow your pride
if I have things (faith?) you need to borrow
For no one can fill
those of your needs
That you won’t let show”
Just to let you know, I found lyrics in one YouTube that substituted the word “faith” for “things”. Think about that one. I don’t know how to settle it, so if anybody knows which word is right, please comment. Anyway, it’s a little embarrassing and revelatory that I heard “…if I have pain…” instead of “…if I have things (or faith)…” And I never really heard “…That you won’t let show.”
Yet I lived it.
Years later, after I’d finished college, medical school, residency in psychiatry, and had taught residents and medical students at the University of Iowa for a number of years, one of my colleagues, Scott, a brilliant psychologist and writer, stopped by my office one day. This was years ago.
His name is Scott and he suggested that it would be nice to get together sometime soon to catch up. I deferred and I remembered he replied while looking off down the hallway, “I’m 70.” I wonder if he meant he didn’t know how much more time he had left.
Scott and I had taken similar paths in the middle of our careers at Iowa. I wanted to try private practice and left for Madison, Wisconsin. Scott got the same idea and left for a position in Hershey, Pennsylvania. We both regretted it and soon after returned to Iowa. I swallowed my pride and came back because I loved teaching. I think he returned for the same reason. We were both grateful that the UIHC Psychiatry Dept. Chair, Bob Robinson, welcomed both us of back.
Jim’s teaching awardsBooks by Scott and Jim
I touched base with Scott a little while ago. We’re both retired. I was trying to find out how to contact Bob about messages I was getting from the publisher of our consult psychiatry handbook. Neither Scott or I could find out what was going on with Bob, who retired several years ago and moved back East. It turned out he had died. Sometimes we all have sorrow.
Scott is my friend, and I leaned on him a long time ago. I’m unsure if I let it show. I’m 70 and I’m grateful to him.
On that note, I’m finding out that I can’t walk all the way to the mall and back anymore. On the other hand, I can walk about half that distance. It’s about a mile and a half out to the Clear Creek Trail and back. There’s a lot of uphill and downhill stretches along the way. I can manage that.
And Sena bought me a couple of pairs of new shoes that I’m breaking in that will probably be easier on my feet and my calves. They’re Skecher slip-ons, not to be confused with the no hands slip-ins. I’m used to slip-ons. I tried one pair out today, in fact. Before I left, I took a few pictures of Sena’s new garden. As usual, she’s planting new flowers. The dogwood tree looks great. She’s even excited about the wild phlox. I can’t keep track of everything else out there. She makes the beauty out there.
And I lean on her for that.
dogwood treewild phloxeven more flowersflowersmore flowersnew shoes1new shoes2
We were reminiscing about our elementary school days following a discussion of news article about what some educators want to do with the school day schedule. Apparently, kids are pretty sleepy in class and teachers think it’s because they’re sleep deprived. Apparently, they’re not getting enough sleep at night and the proposal is that the school day schedule ought to be pushed ahead, the day starting at 9 AM instead of 8 AM.
Maybe the kids should be off their electronic devices a little earlier in the evening.
I guess there have been studies supporting this idea for years, but of course I hadn’t heard of it. Nobody seems to be in a hurry to change the system.
What we remembered were the consequences imposed by teachers and principals when we didn’t perform up to expectations in class, or misbehaved in class or on the playground.
Sena had a little trouble with remembering the vowels, a e i o u and sometimes y. She had so much trouble with it that she had to stay after school to write that out over and over on two big blackboards. It took quite a while. That was back in the days when blackboards were big and covered one entire wall of the classroom. There was always more chalk available if she ran out. Sometimes the penalty for her not paying attention was a few sharp raps on the top of her head with a No.2 pencil. Most often it was for talking out of turn or not paying attention.
I got caught a couple of times for throwing snowballs on the playground. I think it was at least a couple of times. The consequence for this infraction was to sit in the principal’s office drawing little circles resembling snowballs on a sheet of paper. They had to be small so that it took you a long time to fill up the paper. If you made them too big, the principal made you flip the sheet over and do it again. I think if you got writer’s cramp, you had to switch hands.
My brother and I had to walk to and from school. We had to get up early and sometimes the snow was up to our knees. It was about a half-mile walk to school. One winter day, I was walking home and found a dog frozen stiff as a statue next to the sidewalk.
I spent most of time after lunch looking at the clock, wishing the hands would move faster to 3 PM, when school let out. I would walk home and because I was a latchkey kid, I just let myself in the house.
I guess moving the time up so that kids can be more awake during the morning wouldn’t hurt anything. Maybe the curriculum will be simplified a little bit too. Things like geography could be easier. You could change the name of the Gulf of Mexico (or is it the Gulf of America now?) to something that makes more sense—like the Gulf of Water.
If you can’t learn that, maybe you need to have your head rapped with a No.2 pencil.
The Christmas Amaryllis/Hippeastrum flowers are doing well.
I’m getting older and often I wake up early in the morning feeling anxious and a little blue. I look at the news headlines about people who die and often they’re my age or even younger. Maybe the Christmas holiday does that.
When I get this feeling of dread, I try to think of what I can be grateful for. It’s hard to think of big dramatic experiences. If I sit still long enough, it’s the little acts of kindness that drop down like snowflakes, slowly.
The grade school teacher who took the time to figure out I needed eyeglasses because I couldn’t see the blackboard.
The preacher who sat up all night in a chair with my sick mother when my brother and I were little kids and didn’t know how to help her.
The company that hired me for my first real job when I was a teenager. If they hadn’t done that, I might have become homeless.
The guy who took me to an autumn outdoor art show where he was exhibiting his paintings on a brisk autumn day. Man, it was cold.
The guy who took me to a Minnesota Twins baseball game in the summer. Man, it was hot.
I remember a couple of best friends. We weren’t friends long—but it was long enough.
The friends who supported Sena and me on our wedding day. I still remember it with gratitude 47 years later.
The other day we walked the Terry Trueblood Trail (when do we not do that?) and saw interesting sights. I finally got a video clip of a goldfinch! And a male northern cardinal either sang to us or cussed us out. It was hard to tell.
It was a scorcher out there. We started out looking for a walking trail a guy gave us directions to a week or so ago. It’s a great place for birding. We found it, but here was no parking anywhere close. He told us that we could park in a farmer’s field, but we saw the farmer out there and decided not to chance it.
While we were out doing that, we drove by a cornfield, which really impressed Sena because we could drive right up close to it. She’s never detasseled corn. I have and I don’t think she missed anything. I walked the rows with fellow detasselers and we yanked them. We were in rows right next to each other. We could hear each other collapse from time to time from exhaustion. When you pulled the tassels out, they sort of squeaked. You could hear us: Squeak, squeak, squeak, thud.
On the other hand, we had a pretty good day birding out at Trueblood. I got a better video clip of a dickcissel. We saw a couple of geese scare a turtle off a rock in Sand Lake. We didn’t notice it at the time, but saw it on the video clip after we got home (which is still the hotel, by the way).
We saw several dickcissels. We still don’t think they sound like they’re singing “dick, dick, dick.” I think that’s a load of squeak, squeak, squeak. They are pretty birds, though.
The other day we had some stormy weather roll across central Iowa, although it was not as bad as the tornado that swept through Greenfield. We hope the best for them. We didn’t actually get a tornado, but I remember wondering why the siren went off about 6:00 a.m. It woke me up and I wondered what was the matter. Turns out it was a tornado warning and we had to sit in the basement for a little while. It was a little scary, but the storm moved east pretty quickly northeast out of our area.
For whatever reason, this eventually led to my reminiscing about my younger days. Maybe it was because of a temporary scare and increased awareness of our mortality.
I used to work for a consulting engineers company called WHKS & Co. in Mason City, Iowa. This was back in the days of the dinosaurs when it was challenging to set stakes for rerouting highways around grazing diplodocus herds.
I was young and stupid (compared to being old and stupid now by way of comparison). I lived at the YMCA and took the city bus to the Willowbrook Plaza where the WHKS & Co. office was located on the west side of town.
I usually got there too early and stopped for breakfast at the Country Kitchen. The waitress would make many trips to my table to top off my coffee while I sat there waiting for the office to open. That was fine because I had a strong bladder in those days. I left tips (“Don’t cross the street when the light is red”).
My duties at WHKS & Co. included being rear chain man and rod man, at least when I first started. A “chain” was the word still being used for a steel tape for measuring distances. It was well past the days when land surveyors used actual chains for that purpose. You had to use a plumb bob with the chain to make sure you were straight above the point (usually marked by a nail or an iron property corner pin) you measuring to and from.
You and the lead chain man had to pull hard on each end of the chain to make sure it was straight. It was challenging, especially on hot days when my hands were sweaty and the chain was dirty. Callouses helped.
The rod was for measuring vertical distances and an instrument called a level was used with that. One guy held up the rod which was marked with numbers and the guy using the level read the elevation. Another way to measure both horizontal and vertical angles used a rod and a different instrument that we called a theodolite (older instrument name was “transit”).
We worked in all kinds of weather, although not during thunderstorms. In fact, when it was looking like rain out in the field, a standard joke for us sitting in the truck waiting for rain was to draw a circle on the windshield (imaginary, you just used your finger although if your finger was dirty which it always was, you left a mark) and if a certain number of drops fell in the circle, you could sit in the truck and play cards.
When we played cards, it was always the game Hearts, which I could not play skillfully at all. I always lost. But it kept us out of the rain. If a big thunderstorm blew in, we just headed back home.
This is a short post about my initial impressions about the book, “Our Hidden Conversation” by Michele Norris.
I’m not finished with the book yet, but I thought I would let you know that the first chapter, “Bread Crumbs” was tough to read. I had to put it down and come back to it a few times because it brought back memories.
The chapter title “Bread Crumbs” means the clues that parents, grandparents, etc. might leave for subsequent generations to find which might shed light on one’s background, explain troubling circumstances, and so on.
I have some bread crumbs left to me by my family. Some are in the form of photos, although there is no family photo of all of us together.
I remember the hair combing routine my mom had with me and my brother every Sunday morning before church when we were kids. Our father was black and my mother was white. Dad was out of the home and we lived with mom. We were the only black kids in the church. In fact, all the members were white.
Mom used a prodigious amount of hair oil while vigorously combing our curly hair back. It took many strokes and the pulling pinched a bit. The ritual took a little while. When I look back on it, I guess the goal was to straighten our hair as much as possible.
Everyone in the church always treated us kindly and I was baptized there.
If you decide to read “Our Hidden Conversations,” give yourself a break whenever you feel like you need it.
The wildfires in Maui are so devastating. We wish everyone the best. We also had a wave of nostalgia back to 1997 when we visited the Hawaiian Islands on our first vacation in a long while after I finished my psychiatry residency in 1996.
The plane trip was very long and what I remember most about it, flying all the way from Iowa, was the terrible case of bilateral airplane ear which lasted for a couple of hours after we landed in Honolulu. After that, things got a lot better. It was a long time ago, so the memories are a little hazy.
We remember the bus from the airport stopped at the hotel where the tour guide got out to check the reservations for all of us. It was very hot because the bus driver didn’t want to let the vehicle run so as to allow the air conditioner to cool us off. We were probably the youngest members of the tour group. It was the oldest who complained the loudest, finally convincing the bus driver to start the bus to cool everybody off.
After we arrived at the hotel, it was also the oldest members who had the energy to go out and see Don Ho perform. When they got back, they said he got drunk, but he was able to sing “Tiny Bubbles.” We were too exhausted to go. The oldest group members were often the most energetic.
We went a great little restaurant in either Kauai or maybe it was in Hilo, Hawaii (the Big Island) and got plates of huge shrimp. They were shorthanded on servers and several members of the tour group (again the older ones) pitched in to help out.
We saw the Kodak Hula Show in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. I read a little about it and the show nearly closed in 1999, but it was taken over by the Hogan Family Foundation for three years at a cost of half-million dollars per year. The show closed in 2002 so that the money could be used to fund educational programs.
Of course. we also visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. One of our tour group members who was a veteran of that war wept as he read the names. We became friends with him and his wife and sent each other Christmas cards for a few years afterward.
We saw the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Gardens in Hilo, Hawaii. It’s huge. It was a tribute to the Japanese immigrants to The Big Island who helped build its agricultural history beginning in 1868.
We visited the Wailua River State Park Fern Grotto Area and the Waimea Canyon in Kauai. The latter is also known as The Grand Canyon of the Pacific. I think Kauai was where I first tried coffee-flavored ice cream—Kona coffee, I’m sure. It remains one of my favorites, next to plain vanilla.
We got a few photos of the Iao Needle in the Iao Valley on Maui. We went to a big luau, but I can’t remember exactly where it was. I remember I was coming down with a head cold and had a runny nose. We tried poi, and I’m afraid I didn’t find it very tasty—and it had nothing to do with cold. Maui was the final island to see on our itinerary. I think we saw the huge Banyan Tree in Lahaina because we have a picture of a very large tree with Sena standing in front of it.
The 150-year-old Banyan Tree was charred in the fire, but it’s still standing.
Sena bought a bag of ground Costa Rica Tarrazu coffee the other day. It brings back memories. We savored it along with some piano music from George Winston, may he rest in peace.
You can gas about coffees a lot. You can call Tarrazu a thing which has a certain complexity of notes, a balanced flavor, a spicy character and whatnot. I guess appraising coffee can be similar to judging wines. I don’t like wine and know nothing about it. I don’t know much about coffee, either.
But there’s a coffee connoisseur who made a YouTube video evaluating the Tarrazu we have. He said it has “coffee notes.” I should hope so. He gave it a so-so rating, 6.1. I guess there’s a 10-point rating scale. I think he takes subtle sarcasm to a new level. He had some kind of fancy coffee filter I’ve never seen before. He compared Tarrazu to coffee you get from Denny’s restaurant—as though Denny’s is a highbrow establishment. He also said it has chocolate notes. I actually noticed that years ago.
We first tasted Tarrazu at the World Market in Madison, Wisconsin many years ago. The drive from Iowa City to Madison was a pleasure. We took the more scenic route, which was Highway 151. Just in case you read this and make the trip yourself, I’ll say this: what is scenic to one is boring to another.
I remember we sampled Tarrazu from those little white Styrofoam cups in the World Market store. It was the smoothest coffee we ever tasted. We were hooked and bought a bag.
There’s a lot to do in Madison, which is not to say there’s not much to do in Iowa City. There’s just more of everything in Madison. Every day there was some new attraction to explore. Tarrazu was also a new experience.
We had a lot of fun in Madison. We went up to Wisconsin Dells and darn near froze to death on an open boat ride in the early fall. Part of the “fun” of the ride was mainly for the driver, I think. He would rev the boat at rocket speed and splash us with water, which could have had a thin skin of ice notes over it, judging from the shock. We saw the House on the Rock in Spring Green. We relaxed at the Sundara spa. We rode the horse-drawn wagon on the Lost Canyon tour and still have a deck of playing cards from the gift shop.
We’ve bought Tarrazu a couple of times since our adventure in Madison and found that, somehow, the flavor wasn’t quite as bright, not as smooth. On one bag, the name was spelled “Terrazu” rather than “Tarrazu. Sure, it had “coffee notes,” but not the chocolate notes. And it didn’t evoke memories of Wisconsin.
Finally, getting back to the Tarrazu we have now. The taste is miraculous, just like it was so many years ago. It takes me back to the Styrofoam cups at World Market, the speedboat in the frigid water, the Sundara bedsheets stained by previous guests with mud notes from the spa, the Infinity Room in Spring Green, cheese curds and chili.
Today, I was thinking of a guy named Al Martin, who was one of the few African American role models for me when I was a teenager in Mason City, Iowa. I thought of him a couple of years ago, googled his name and couldn’t find him. I mentioned him anyway in a blog post at that time, “Snow Moon Reflections.” A major topic was black male role models.
Today, for some reason I thought of him again. I googled his name once more and found an obituary for a man named Allen Henry Martin. This particular Martin was a black man who was 83 years old when he died just this last November of 2022. The obituary stated that he was a talented artist, just as I recall. Despite the many decades gone by, his photograph looked familiar to me.
He was a sculptor and photographer as well as a painter. He worked several different jobs. He had a great sense of humor. He worked as a land surveyor for several years, which I connect with because I did that for a while when I was young.
I’m not absolutely certain that Allen Henry Martin is the same Al Martin who I looked up to when I was at a tender age. But for now, I’m going to assume they were one and the same.
One time, Al Martin took me to an art show where he set up many of his pictures. It was a brisk autumn day. We drank a lot of coffee, partly to keep warm. I remember how uncomfortable I felt because of my full bladder. The wind was cold.
I don’t know why I remember this, but Al one time spoke of his children and he happened to mention what he did when they felt sick to the stomach. It sounds gross, but he made the story comical and said something like, “Many a time I caught vomit in my hands!” It was disgusting—but funny at the same time, the way he told that little story. You really had to be there to get it.
As I read this, I catch myself thinking I should have something more solemn and dignified to say about Al.
But this is not an obituary. These are just my memories of Al Martin which are fading the older I get, and I’m entitled to them. Al Martin was a great guy.
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