“Who’s Mike?” she asked.

“A basketball coach we first had in junior high AAU basketball.”

“What made you think of him?”

“He made us feel like anything was possible.  I wasn’t talented, but he believed in me.  In exchange I gave him everything I had.  I wonder what happened to that kid and his effort sometimes.  He used to call me the whirling dervish.”

“Sounds ferocious.”

“I was constantly in a state of falling down.

He taught us man to man, obscure zone defenses, and a full court press for each.  The teams we played against knew only the 2-3 or man to man.  Perhaps they knew one full court press.  We quickly understood the importance of knowledge, and the advantage to be had by aggressively putting it to use.

We had a kid so talented, Mike would have the rest of us set up in the press, then he would give the ball to Ryan and have him break it.  He taught us respect for one another.

There was a kid who got nervous anytime he had to go in.  One game we were down to six players with a quarter and a half to go.  The kid had a long time to think about it.  One of us finally fouled out, and Mike looked to the bench and found him white as a ghost.

‘You only have four out here, Coach,’ said the ref.  ‘He needs to come in.’

‘Those four can handle themselves.  Let me talk to my guy here for a second or two.’  Mike draped his arm around him and cracked a joke in his ear.”

“What happened to Mike?”

“He wore his heart out.  He’d always been a heavy smoker.  There was something about him that seemed to love the anxiety and stress of life.  He was born to be a coach.  It was his calling.  Hip deep in the thick of it, always making adjustments.

I remember going into see him in the hospital.  He was gray.  As a boy I found it hard to believe how a strong man could suddenly look so weak.  Then he opened his mouth.  He was as cantankerous as ever.  Still in the thick of it, making adjustments.  Undefeated.  All heart.

He got his transplant.  He quit smoking for quite awhile.  He set some goals for the rest of his life.  He died over ten years ago.”

“What sticks with you?”

“Mike had asked them to play ‘My Way’ at his funeral.  The pastor obliged.  I was twenty something and still a kid.  I thought the song was about pride.   Years later it struck me that for Mike maybe it was simply about him knowing who he was.  Not many know that about themselves.

We played for him.  Some coaches only desire that.  We played for each other.  Some coaches understand that.  I think what Mike most wanted was for us to play for ourselves.  Few really get that.”

“So he wasn’t a ‘there’s no I in team’ guy?”

“I don’t think he would have known how you could function in a team without knowing your own strengths and weaknesses.  He knew his.  He knew ours.  He knew something about who we could be.”

“Sounds like he made an impression.”

“I loved him.  He loved us.”

I first met Barry Dunn in 2010. It was at a leadership program sponsored by the American Simmental Association, and it was hosted by South Dakota State University. He had just become he Dean of the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences. He’s since become the president of the school itself.

I recall him to be a slight man, tall and thin. He wore wire rim glasses. It all made it hard to picture him working cows. There didn’t seem to be an ounce of profanity in him.

I was there to learn new things. I suppose I thought I already knew a great deal at the time. A few of the things I thought I knew, I still know. One is that the cattle business is a people business.

The topic he chose to discuss was related to cattle production. Its application went far beyond that, however. Occasionally, I am able to dust it off and make some use of it.

“Have any of you heard of the idea of Systems Theory?”

I hadn’t. If anyone else in the room had, they decided to keep it to themselves.

“Systems Theory is an idea that has been around for awhile. It pops in a lot of places, and can be found in several of the sciences. The idea is that in order to properly understand something, we need to look at how the thing or individual functions and is impacted by the whole of the system it is in.

The popular author, Malcom Gladwell, uses the following story to describe the ideas of Systems Theory. It goes something like this:

On the most basic level there are two types of systems in life: simple and complex. The simple system works along the following lines: You are in your house. You are cold. You turn the thermostat up. You are warm.

The complex system, on the other hand, functions as follows: You are in your house. You are cold. You turn the thermostat up. You get colder.

We spend most of our lives convinced that we live in simple systems. What we fail to see is that most of the systems we are in are actually complex. In such a manner, we spend our time actively working against that which we most desire.”

from the comfort of my house
across a slickened stoop
into the brown grass
that laid in an icy tomb
with a silent hint of green
glistening its way through
ventured I in the January rain
into a frozen world
on the day for MLK

the only sound to rise
against the murmur of the mist
was the cattle who milled
discontented against the trees
and in the heat of living
kept the ice at bay
I thought of people
in another day

headed home from town later
on six lanes that lay new
built to carry those
who hadn’t got there yet
every star extinguished
by this icy mist
in the comfort of the car
heat and noise within

I met Gary Bailey while I was a student at the University of Iowa.  He was an associate professor in religion.  I first met him when he assumed instructing the tail end of a course taught by the college’s most popular professor, a rabbi named Jay Holstein.

Holstein had an abrupt, drill-instructor type style.  He paced.  There was a cadence to how he spoke.  He’d occasionally force a stutter to keep the beat.  He swore like a sailor.  When Bailey came in after him, the class would find he possessed nearly all the same eccentricities as Holstein, minus, perhaps, the profanity.

It was so uncanny, within 10 minutes of the start of his first lecture, you could hear the scoff from the several hundred kids in the auditorium.

“What’s this guy trying to do, imitate the last guy?”  Attendance would drop by the score.

The assumption of the students was natural. What I would subsequently learn, however, is that it was simply who he really was.  It was an unfortunate coincidence.

As much as I loved Holstein for the way he read the texts of the Bible, and those of  Melville and Hemingway, there was something about Bailey that read even better.  I would take a small seminar with him.  In that class was Holstein’s son.  Towards the end of the semester I would confide in him.

“You know, I once thought Bailey was just a hack copying your father.  Anymore I think he might be the first genius I’ve ever met, if that were something I could judge.”

“Bailey is a genius.  He’s got a real problem, though.”

“What is that?”

“He’s a white protestant trying to get a job at a time when any religion department that still exists is looking for diversity.”

For Bailey it would be another unfortunate coincidence.

Bailey had asked an interesting question in class that day while we were reading Hemingway.

“What do you guys think is the opposite of love?”

“Hate,” was the response scattered back from those in the small class room with large windows that looked over the street below.

“I’m not going to take that as the right answer.  You guys ought to do some thinking on that.  Let me ask it another way.  What is it that stands in the way of truly loving or hating anybody?”

“Fear,” came from the long, lanky kid who hung out in the back of the room and seldom said much of anything.  He was a loner-type, both in class and out of it.  The only other words I remember from him were the brief, inaudible murmurs shared between he and Bailey whenever our papers came back.

“Fear,” echoed Bailey with a smile of approval.  “You know a very wise person once said that it was a very fine line that separated love or hate from fear, and it was very difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference.”

I’ve never found what came of Gary Bailey.  I have never found who to attribute his quote to.  What I have found, however, is that generally we are quite certain we can tell the difference he spoke about above.  We seldom ever contemplate it.  An unfortunate coincidence, I suppose, for all of us.

Somehow I always wind up coming back to re-dig the dirt I’ve already dug.  This in spite of beginning with the conviction that I have started on something new.  That conviction usually resigns itself as soon as it encounters a sign that I have been there before.

In the first days of December, I came back to add more drainage tile to a place I had worked three years ago.  I was certain I remembered which side of the draw I had been up before, so I set my machine in on the opposite side and went.  The dirt was deep and black, and I sunk the tile down to match it.  About a hundred feet up the waterway, I saw a bit of plastic tile come around, snagged in the wheel of the trencher.

It figures, I thought.  I hadn’t remembered correctly.  I was where I had been before.  Daylight was waning, and I was in a hurry to get done before I lost it.

I hit the line at the slightest of angles, about 6 inches below the four foot depth I had placed it at before. At the bottom I could see the jagged end of the tile I had hit.  I fished a knife out of my pocket and hopped down in the trench to cut the jagged end smooth and connect it back up.

I thought nothing of it.  The ground wasn’t wet.  I hadn’t seen a sidewall cave in a month.

Down in the bottom, on my hands and knees, I had just cut the tile clean and was closing up my knife.  I heard something.  It was the slightest sound, and a split second later I felt a clod hit my shoulder.  I remember trying to get my knees up, and then I remember the quick and silent, heavy stillness of the weight that caught me at the middle of my back and down.

I tired to do what I always try to do:  go forward.  It is the simplest of all desires.  What strikes you is how bad you want it.  I was successful.  What strikes you next is the thought that desire has little to do with it.  It is shared equally by those who were and those who weren’t.

That’s humility, I guess.

A few deep breaths, and I was climbing out to get the excavator to clear the dirt away, and get back to where I had been, now for the third time.

“It’s a funny thing, you know?”

“What is?”

“The way we keep going.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“I suppose it is how we are wired.  Some go on in defiance.  Some go on in the faith that it is going to work out.  Sometimes I just think it is the best way to pass the time.”

“You should be more careful.”

“We all should.  Something is always trying to swallow us up.”

Her since of humor would be considered refined at any age, but it is all the more notable since Mags is only 12.  It takes some work to get her to smile, and you have to set the bar higher than you do for most.  If you are successful, your reward is usually but a brief, wry grin.

It was getting late, and there were four of us in a detached garage.  A wood burning stove kept us warm, a big screen television provided the entertainment, and a dorm sized refrigerator provided a little pre-holiday cheer.  Mags, of course, did all of that too.

“Where’s your mother at?” I asked.

“She’s putting presents under the tree.”

“For Santa?”  She looked at me dryly.

“That ship sailed a long time ago,” and her face relented with a slight twinkle in her eye.

There she sat, then.  Eagerly having let go of what she needed to in older to grow older, only to wind up old someday, like the rest of us, and trying in vain to grab it back.

“Suppose any have your name on them?”  That brief, wry grin was the only response.

“Dad, could I have another Mountain Dew?”

“No.  It’s late.  You’ll be going to bed soon.  I think you’ve had enough.”

She was disappointed, but she never raised an objection.  I tossed an empty can to the container in the back corner, and I reached into the dorm fridge for a beverage of my own.  Out with it, came a Mountain Dew.  Responsibility could wait for another day.  I slid it over to her, behind her father ahead.

The grin broke into an all out smile, a silent giggle that finally betrayed her youth.  Though that youth was beyond me now, it wasn’t beyond her yet.  Secretly she sipped it, and all the more talkative she got.  She laughed and laughed, and I did too.  We all did.

If our youth is beyond us, it thankfully isn’t beyond the young yet.  I suppose it is their gift to the old.  They would never believe that it was far too big to ever get under a tree.

 

When U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, took the podium at the General Session of the 98th Annual Meeting of the Iowa Farm Bureau, he did so representing a blue administration and looked out at a sea of people who mostly called the red areas of the state their home. I, myself, had never voted for him.

He would speak conversationally, in a soft tone, like a farmer in his pickup, opening the door to offer you a ride back. Back from where? Back from the brink, perhaps. It’s a service thehard working folks of the heartland have provided more than once. Vilsack should know the way, he’d seen the brink before.

“A tragedy, actually almost 30 years to the day in my small hometown of Mt. Pleasant, created an opportunity for me to get into public service,” Vilsack said. “You all have given me just an incredible opportunity. You’ve allowed me to realize every dream I ever had as a kid. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to give a guy from Pennsylvania the opportunity to be a mayor…to be a state senator. You certainly didn’t have to give me the opportunity to be the governor of this great state for eight years, and because of that I had the opportunity to serve you as the secretary of agriculture for eight years.”

The tragedy he referenced was on December 10th, 1986. Ralph Davis was to address a Mt. Pleasant City Council meeting, but instead produced a handgun with which he wounded two city council members and killed the mayor, Edd King. King’s father would later wind up at Vilsack’s law office and persuade him to run for mayor.

A Des Moines Register article records that Davis, in his court testimony said he did not regret the shooting, and if he could do it over again he’d get a better gun. Last year, Vilsack was interviewed about the incident as Mt. Pleasant began restoration work on the memorial fountain erected in King’s honor. Of Davis, who spent time as a Japanese prisoner of war in WWII, Vilsack said, “I believe in my heart that that experience really changed him mentally. Had he not had that POW experience, one wonders whether he would have not done what he did.”

In our current efforts to build a more charitable world by being uncharitable to those we deem uncharitable, it was the charity of Secretary Vilsack that stood out.

“The 15% of the population that lives in rural America supplies 35-40% of our military. Over my lifetime, it has increased its production by 170% on 26% less land and with 22 million fewer farmers. That production has lead to low cost food that has stimulated our economy. Everyone that does something other than farming, gets to do it because of agriculture. Agriculture has made us a land of unlimited opportunity. A country so great that a child that began life in an orphanage winds up spending his time talking to the President in the White House.”

He reminded the crowd once more of the importance of protecting our water, of free trade, and of an immigration system that works. Having said his peace, he drew his remarks to a close.

“People ask me why I have stayed. I stayed because I love the people I work for. I stayed because I love the people I work with. I’ve got to meet a lot of hard working farmers and ranchers in this country, and as long as I live, I’ll always be grateful.”

The crowd rose and applauded. I jotted down his final line. When I had finished, I got in with him.

Whether or not love trumps hate, I do not know. I do know either is equally rare. In their place stand more often than not stand fear and ignorance. If not for you, then for me.

Fear and ignorance are trumped by charity. Charity is neither red or blue. It drives a humble truck, and perhaps it will get us all away from the brink.

I’ve been unable to write of any consequence for the last couple of months.  Last night I gave serious thought about how I might shut down this little blog and began in earnest in writing the piece that would do that.  This morning I scrapped it.

In early fall I was dating a good gal.  The two of us took a drive one day.  From her side, she asked me, “You drive this old car, slip into a World Series jacket, and wherever you go someone winds up striking up a conversation about one or the other.  What do you suppose that says about you?”

“Please talk to me, I guess.”

And they have:  women and men, straight and gay, white and other, rural and urban, rich and poor, successful and working on it, conservative and liberal, faithful and unaffiliated.  I’ve enjoyed it all, and this Thanksgiving will find me thankful for that.   It also reminds me what a shame it is they don’t do a better job of talking to each other, and how common it is becoming to simply have no connection at all.

The blog’s original premise was that there is nothing so ancient to connect us to the human experience than the sharing of a story.  Just as ancient is the refusal to connect.  From Bobby Kaufmann to Hamilton, I guess.

There might be a good chance that around the Thanksgiving Day table, some of those groups you aren’t part of will be seated there.  You can refuse to deal with them if you want.  You can also opt to be present and accounted for.  If so, save more of the speech than you would have otherwise.  Replace it with a story and try to let them write a little of it.

It gets you out of your group, them out of theirs, and you become what you always were:  two people in the end.

“Maybe tomorrow, Honey, someplace down the line,
I’ll wake up older, so much older, momma,
I’ll wake up older, and I’ll just stop all my trying.”

When I turned thirty, they had a party at the world-famous Cumming Tap.  I drank with friends, and I remember thinking how I was almost on the cusp of something.  How I was almost there.

I don’t remember where the ‘there’ was exactly.  It doesn’t matter now anyhow.  ‘There’ is always where we think it ought to be.  It isn’t, though.  It turns out to be nothing more than the places we find along the way.

Recently I turned 40 on an empty stomach and in the same location.  I hung out at the back of the bar this time.  Eventually I had enough beer to step ahead, just like we’d done 10 years ago.  Shots came around from the bar, and the evening gets dark, save a vague recollection of the chocolate chip cookies and cupcakes that made a vain attempt to soak up the alcohol which had already gotten a big head start.

The only thing I was on the cusp of was a hangover.

Though my short night would seem to point otherwise, I’ve reached 40 with a better idea where that elusive there is.  It’s no longer an income, or a status, or a job.  It’s simply an idea of the man I would like to be.

I’ve got a better idea of the principles I want to get there with, and the path in the dark wood I much take to reach it.  I’ve begun to find the maturity to know I’ll never see the finish line, and I hope I’ve found the wisdom that part of our purpose in life is to make sure we don’t.

We are never as far away as when we think we’ve arrived.  It’s the constant state of becoming that makes a man.  I’ll grow up one of these days.

40, then, is the age when you replace the destination with the journey.  May you turn it having had lunch or dinner.  Afterwards, may you find your way back to the path.

November 4th is the U.S. release of Hacksaw Ridge, a film portraying part of the life of Desmond Doss, a U.S. Army Medic who would become the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honor.  Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist.  His church uses the term “conscientious participant.”

Just over a month later, on December 11th, Bob Dylan will accept the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.  He’s the first songwriter to have ever received it.  Considerable debate continues on if he deserves it.  I suppose it depends on one’s view of Dylan.

How to view Dylan is the subject of another a movie, a documentary directed by Martin Scorsese called No Direction Home.  It covers the period in the mid 1960s when Dylan left the folk scene which propelled him to prominence.  In one scene fellow songwriter, Joan Baez, delivers the following quote about Dylan and their one time relationship:

“I was feeling this political pull very strongly, and I was thinking what the two of us could do together as far as any kind of movement….Dylan wanted to do his music, and I wanted to do all this other stuff….He had given us by that point the greatest songs in our anti-war/civil rights arsenals.

 Thirty some years whenever I go to a march, sit-in, or lie-in, or jail-in, people always say ‘Is Bob coming?’ I say he never comes you moron. When are you going to get it? Never did, probably never will…I think he didn’t want to have to be the guy people were going to have to go to. The times then were cut and dried you were either for the war or against it…You were forced to take a side.”

The quote comes at a time when the camera has already caught several, including Baez, patting themselves on the back for bringing Dylan out of obscurity.  It’s also catching a sense of the bitterness his leaving left them with.  While Baez seems to suggest Dylan took the self-serving, easy way out, Scorsese’s camera as well as his title seem to point in a different direction.

It is as though Dylan chose to protest even the protestors, and traded in their self-congratulatory acknowledgement to continue to grow.  We see the hostility, isolation, and mental strain that result.  Perhaps Dylan’s songs have no “them” to direct our ire against.  Perhaps there is only an us, and that’s the side Dylan took.

The movie has a scene where Dylan is about to be honored by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in late 1963.  Dylan says about the dinner, “They were trying to build me up as a topical song writer. I was never a topical song writer to begin with. For whatever reason they were doing it was reasons that didn’t really apply to me.”

Scorsese delivers this quote from Dylan that evening, the only quote in Scorsese’s own voice:

“There is no black, white, left and right to me anymore. There is only up and down. And down is very close to the ground, and I’m trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics.”

Dylan could have dropped off the face of the earth to do that, but he didn’t.

In between Hacksaw Ridge and the Nobel Ceremony, lies the event currently dominating the news cycle.  One prominent American Evangelist has encouraged his followers to “hold their noses and vote.”  The trouble is that he isn’t really asking them to hold their nose; he is asking them to hold their conscience.

In conscience I was going to object to that particular race altogether.  Upon reflection I suppose I should try to find a way to participate.  Dylan’s lead would suggest we can do so by engaging the group we’re associated with instead of posturing towards the other one for a change.  Doss’ seems to suggest the same thing.  Perhaps in doing so, we grow.

Growth knows no party, and either seems to offer plenty of opportunity for it.

Does Bob Dylan deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for Literature?  Damn straight.  It isn’t his fault if we can’t read.

1965, working for himself:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8yU8wk67gY