14 years both a lifetime and a blip

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After growing up for 14 years in the same house, a mile outside of tiny town Wisconsin, population 788, Uncle Sam’s invitation during the waning months of the military draft started a lifelong journey that included 11 interstate moves and 23 residences.

After the Army, that nomadic lifestyle was encouraged by my career pursuit of “more and better.” We chased “God’s calling” from the plains of Oklahoma, to the mountains of Colorado, to the ocean of North Carolina.

But, stability was the hallmark of my early years. I was born at a very young age and when I came home from the hospital, it was to a 19-foot trailer I shared with my parents and older sister. And then a younger sister.

But my hardworking dad bought an 80-acre farm when I was five and I lived upstairs in a big farmhouse on the “old Peterson place” from age 5 to 19. I graduated high school in the same building where I started first grade. And, the 53 members of my graduating class were basically the ones I learned to read with, except for some transfers from a small elementary school nearby.

Almost everyone around me in rural, farm country Wisconsin was similarly stable. People didn’t come and go. They were born and stayed.

I left at age 18 for college in Iowa, then came home for the summer when I got my “Uncle Sam Wants You” invitation. I RSVP’d and that party took me to Missouri, Texas and Colorado in under two years.

When I got out, I went to New Mexico to serve in a Baptist mission, then to Oklahoma to resume my education at a different college when the school where I started declined to automatically renew the scholarships I had before I was drafted.

After graduation, I worked on a newspaper in Colorado, then for a Baptist news service in Tennessee. I followed that glistening road back to Texas for seminary, then back to Oklahoma for work and finally, maybe, to North Carolina where I live now, except when I’m on my son’s farm in Pennsylvania or fleeing winter’s chill in Florida.

Twenty-three home addresses. My daughter was six when we moved to North Carolina and it was her fourth state to live in.

And, finding some riding buddies at my second home, in Pennsylvania.

My oldest son graduated from college, worked a year, then went to grad school. After grad school he found gainful employment, bought his first house, did well in his work and moved with the company to a nearby town where he bought his second house. When he had been there four years, he told me that was the longest he’d ever lived in one place.

Ouch.

I say all of the above to say that while enjoying a warm afternoon on the deck with my wife during a late winter warm spell, I realized I’d been living in this house 14 years, by far the longest I’ve lived at a single address since leaving home. It IS my sixth house and fourth city in North Carolina since I landed there when Baptist life in Oklahoma tilted far right and I rolled off in 1987.

Fourteen years is the same amount of time I lived in the house in which I grew up – 880 miles, a culture and a lifetime, away.

I started to try to wrap my head around the similarities – and dramatic differences – between the 14 years I spent in the farm house on County B and the 14 years in Winston-Salem.

The first 14 were literally a lifetime. First grade through high school. Learning to read, to write, to secure a toehold in the social hierarchy, athletics, school plays, band, first kiss and agonizing days wondering “does she like me?”

The 14 here have been so much shorter. We came here for one job, melded into another, then another, before easing into retirement. Then we started to travel and this house is home base but we’re in it less than we’re in other places. And while the first 14 years in Wisconsin were a literal lifetime, the 14 years here are a blip. An elongated blip, maybe, but they’ve passed in the same amount of time it takes a rising sun to find its nesting place in the west.

My dad was 14 when he rode his bicycle 25 miles from Lodi to Rio, WI so he could live with his aunts Vicki and Lillian and attend high school where Lillian taught. Five years later he was a dad and a few years later he planted his family at the farm for 40 years. He envied, but couldn’t quite comprehend, my nomadic journey.

And I just realized that I’m 14 years younger than my dad when he died.

Give a cyclist some room

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One of the greatest joys from a life of cycling was riding RAGBRAI in 2021 with my three children and best buddy from the Army. From left, dipping our wheels in the Mississippi River, are Austin Jameson, Norman Jameson, Erin Frank, Nathan Jameson and Steve Moorhouse.

While riding the bike lane on Longboat Key in Florida, a large SUV glided up beside me and slowed, matching my speed. Given the culture of animosity between cyclists and automobile drivers who think the road was laid for them personally and that any other user traveling five miles per hour slower than them is an impediment expressly forbidden in the Constitution, I kept my eye on it.

I’ve had doors opened to try to knock me off my bike, soda cans tossed at me and curses cast on the wind as cars pass that I can barely hear and never understand except for their volume and intent. I always laugh when people fly by me, shouting some insult that never registers because those idiots don’t realize their words dissipate in the wind like bubbles touching grass blades.

And there are the truck guys immobilized in lines of traffic driving onto the island who see me about to pass unimpeded in the bike lane so they turn their wheels and edge into my space, laughing all the way. I have the last laugh as I rap their truck with my knuckles and roll on, their being impotent – despite their big truck and heavy belt buckle – to bother me at all.

So, this creeping SUV concerns me until I notice its right directional signal blinking. He’s waiting for me to safely pass through the intersection before he turns right, behind me instead of in front of me, avoiding a collision.

May his tribe increase.

The summer of 1972 I took off on my bike from south central Wisconsin to ride 300 miles to Wayzata, MN to see a girl I’d grown close to during my one year at Luther College. I took off on my 10-speed Schwinn wearing cutoff shorts and tennis shoes. I carried a few cans of tuna fish, a few bucks, a water bottle and a sleeping bag.

I had no rain gear, no shelter, no tire repair kit, no helmet, no sunglasses. I’d bought the bike for ten bucks from a friend who’d left it outside all winter in the Iowa snow. And my route on Highway 16 was a major thoroughfare.

I rode 75 miles the first day, at least three times longer than any single ride I’d done before. I slept on the ground in some city park, uninterrupted except for the bug that crawled into my ear. It navigated deeper than I could reach with my finger and in my sleepy desperation I used the plastic tip of my shoe string to squish it so I could get back to sleep.

When I slung my leg over the saddle the next morning for the second leg of my trip, I was so tender I felt like I sat on the sharp edge of a sword.

During that trip, a car passed me just like the SUV on Longboat Key, but he turned right directly in front of me and I crashed into its side. I hit the pavement and the car stopped long enough for the driver to see that I was uninjured before it sped off.

That was on my mind as I watched the SUV beside me.

I’ve ridden across Wisconsin and North Carolina. I’ve ridden RAGBRAI across Iowa four times. My bike travels with me so I’ve ridden in many states and I’m always cognizant of the risk I’m at from inattentive drivers.

In 2023, 1,166 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles, an 86 percent increase from 2010. Approximately 130,000 cyclists are injured annually on U.S. roads.

The common excuse of deadly drivers is “I didn’t see him.” That is NEVER an excuse. A driver is responsible to see everything in his path, from a pothole, to a stop sign, to a kid running into the street to chase a ball, to a cyclist in brightly colored clothes likely adorned with flashing lights.

I’m a little more nervous on the road now, at age 73, more aware of how close cars, trucks and landscaper trailers are to me when they pass; more aware of how distracted and careless drivers are generally.

And more appreciative of the rare auto driver who gives me a wide berth and slows to turn behind me, rather than in front.

Doers Wanted, Needed

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The doer pulls and talker rides while carrying straw to the chicken coop.

In a service economy, how do you find those who will serve?

Remember when the misguided guidance during Covid 19 lockdowns declared that only “essential” workers could go into their jobs? Those declared “essential” weren’t the pencil pushers. Not the multiple degreed, private office, soft hands, computer monitoring, expense account, long lunches crowd. It was the people who really keep society running: the grocers, plumbers, gas pumpers, street maintenance, garbage collectors, furnace fixers and liquor store clerks. 

When my youngest grandson was six he declined to help me shovel wood chips into the tractor bucket, despite the fact that I’d provided him an appropriately sized shovel. Sensing an obvious teaching moment, I paused to deliver an insightful life lesson.

“Corbin,” I said. “In this world nothing gets done without someone doing it, someone actually putting his shoulder to the task, picking up a shovel, swinging a hammer or carrying the load. Some people just want to talk about the job. Others actually do the job.”

With confident aplomb, Corbin said, “Papa, you’re a doer. I’m a talker.”

Growing up in a farming community in southern Wisconsin, I didn’t know many talkers. We were doers or we were not eaters.

Mine was a small town, a tiny town really, 788 people. All the farmers knew which boys were aging up to be useful during summer hay baling, stone picking and corn detasseling seasons. Prime years were age 13 to 15 – 12 if their mama was hefty – strong enough to throw bales, but too young to work for the canning factory. We were ripe and easily enticed by the dollar an hour standard wage.  

My uncle Donnie, the quintessential Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, trained me in most things “farm.” I lived on one side of town, in the country. He lived clear on the other side of town, in the country. We were three miles apart.

I still check the weather frequently, a farm life habit when unreliable forecasts influenced our decisions to cut the alfalfa today, or tomorrow. Will we have three days of sun after we cut it? If it’s going to rain before it’s dried enough to bale, we’ll lose most of the leaves and nutritional value as cow feed.

Now, I check the weather because I want to know if it’s going to be warm enough for a bike ride, dry enough for pickleball or sunny enough for a beach day.

Us hay haulers and stone pickers typically had a main farmer we worked for, someone who would call us first when he needed a hand, someone who asked if we’d be available in three days.

But not everyone cut hay on the same day, so we were glad when the phone rang with work for others. In addition to my uncle Donnie, I liked to work for Bob Manweller or Donovan Selle because they paid $1.25 an hour. Mrs. Selle put on a mean feed, too, and her pretty daughter managed to make herself discreetly visible.

I’ve been a doer my whole life – my wife would say people pleaser – and I swelled with pride when my dad bragged about my work ethic to friends: the way I split wood to feed the basement furnace, or cleaned the stable or mowed the yard. More than the doing, seeing what was done is the source of deep satisfaction for me.

Last year we had to reshingle our roof and put in a new furnace. I couldn’t do either one of those tasks. I did reshingle our first house in 1977, a house so small that when I put in the order, the salesman asked if I was going to cover only part of the house.

But this roofline is much more complicated. And furnaces are huge jobs, and who can fathom the pipes under the kitchen sink and where does the contents of my garbage can go on Thursdays and how does someone in Charlotte restart my modem in Winston-Salem, and when my car tires want to meander how does a guy realign them?

An average of one college a week closes its doors in this country, partly because demographics reveal fewer 18-year-olds, and partly because young people are re-evaluating the benefits of college, realizing that doers can start a career much sooner than talkers and four years later, have no student debt.

Here’s to the doers in the economy. May their tribe increase.

The day I turned old

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I turned old on August 30, 2025. I know the day. And the hour. And the moment.

No wonder the young lady stood to offer me her seat.

For much of my life, I looked younger than my age. I was a husband, father, and owned my second house before I shaved every day.

About age 26, I was in the barber chair with my hair wet and glasses off and my wife walked in, ready to take me home when I was finished, since we managed with one car. The barber noticed that she caught my eye, and asked, “Is that your mother?”

Later we listed some furniture for sale, some of our original “we-need-something-and-this-will-do-until-we-have-money,” pieces. A college girl called, said it would be perfect for her dorm, and arranged a time to come pick it up.

When I answered the door, she looked at me and asked, “Is your mother home?”

To say I was devastated is to say the Johnstown Flood was a trickle. I was floored. It took me days to get over it. Evidently, I still haven’t.

I was a college graduate, Army veteran, working a professional job with national connections and a college girl sees me in my Saturday morning T-shirt and jeans and asks if my mother is home.

I told her my mother lives in Wisconsin, 640 miles away, but if she’s here for the furniture, I can help. And then my wife picked me up off the floor.

Eventually, the sirocco winds of life aged my face, bleached my hair to arctic blonde and added enough wrinkles that I didn’t have to say, “No, really” anymore when my age came up.

My oldest son shares some of my facial features and when I’m introduced as his father, his friends invariably say, “I could’ve guessed.” I keep hoping one day someone will mistake me for his older brother.

Which brings me to the fateful day when the harsh reality of simple observation by a stranger shattered the mistaken impression that all the mirrors in my house are broken. I walk past a mirror, see the image it reflects, and I know that grizzled face can’t be me.

And yet.

In Budapest, Hungary at the beginning of a Danube River cruise taken to celebrate the 50th anniversary of marriage to a beautiful woman I had bamboozled long enough to convince her to marry me, the curtain came down on my illusion.

I stepped onto a tram car and a young woman stood to offer me her seat.

Glass shattered. Ego crumbled. Humility fallen over my shoulders like a granite yoke.

I implored the innocent to return to her seat. Over a language barrier, my pleading eyes, exasperated face and arm motions made my intention clear. “Please. No. Take your seat. ARRGGG.”

She politely declined, and I resolutely remained standing, amid the laughter of our traveling colleagues.

The insult of reality was exacerbated the next day when on a similar tram, my wife was warned that a conductor was on board and was checking tickets. In Budapest persons over age 65 ride public transportation free.  The local was kindly warning my wife that she needed a ticket.

Sue Ellen graciously informed her that she didn’t need a ticket, because she was 70. To which the kind commuter expressed astonishment, of course.

She then looked at me, seeing I was with Sue Ellen, and I swear I heard her ask, “Is that your father?”

 

‘/

Are you as good as dead?

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While collecting shellfish in Australia, Eric Nerhus was bitten almost in half and swallowed by a 10-foot shark.

Swimming 25 feet below the surface, Nerhus, 41, was grabbed over his head by the shark, which took half of Nerhus’ body into his mouth. He was as good as dead.

Thinking quickly, he reached up and poked the shark’s eyes with the chisel he used to collect abalone.  The shark open its mouth and Nehus wriggled out.

Nerhus estimates he spent two minutes inside the shark’s mouth and said his chest was protected from the shark’s sharp teeth by the lead-lined vest used to weight him down as he scoured the ocean floor. He swam to the surface in a cloud of his own blood, where his son helped him into the boat and rushed him to a hospital.

The 2010 movie “127 Hours” featured the dramatic story of Aron Ralston whose arm was pinned to a rock wall by a suddenly shifting boulder while he hiked Utah’s Blue John Canyon.

No matter what he tried to dislodge his arm, he was trapped. After four days his water ran out and he drank his urine. On the sixth day, Ralston realized he was as good as dead.

Then the 27-year-old mountain climber did what he’d always known he had to do, but could not bring himself to do when he thought there was an option. Using his own body weight for leverage, he broke both the bones in his forearm. Then, with his pocketknife Ralston cut off his arm below the elbow and applied a tourniquet. He then rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor and started walking.

He walked seven miles before encountering two tourists who called for a rescue helicopter.  

What’s the point?

Neither Eric Nerhus nor Aron Ralston are dead. At that point in their lives when there was no prospect for more life – when they were as good as dead – they found a way.

Ever thought you were “as good as dead?”  Or wished you were?

  • In the midst of company chaos, your boss approaches you with a grim face;
  • A truck in the approaching lane veers into yours;
  • You discover your father’s debilitating illness is hereditary;
  • At a conference in his office, your docor leans forward and says, “I’m sorry.”
  • Your job loss has led to anxiety, depression and a mortgage foreclosure;
  • You face an impossible financial burden to make good for a child’s accident, illness or bad mistake;
  • A dark secret you’ve carried is suddenly revealed.

Jesus’ friend Lazarus was not only as good as dead. He WAS dead. Then Jesus exercised his power of life over death and he raised Lazarus, demonstrating to us though we be as good as dead, we still possess the life option.

The same is true for a host of other biblical characters. Young David could have killed King Saul (I Sam. 24) when Saul was relieving himself in a cave and David crept in behind him and cut off a piece of his robe. Saul was as good as dead and didn’t even know it.

Joseph had a coat of many colors (Genesis 37), and was his father’s favorite, when his jealous brothers threw him into a cistern to die. He was as good as dead.  

Shadrach Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace; Daniel was tossed to the lions; Jonah was swallowed by the great fish; the adulterous woman dragged for stoning by an angry mob.

Why did God rescue them? Because God had a higher purpose for their lives and something in that near death experience equipped them for that purpose like nothing else could!

Your faith isn’t feeble in the face of life threatening odds. It’s most flaccid when you operate only in the realm of your own abilities, when you’re deluded enough to think you can “do it yourself.”

My favorite traditional hymn is “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” Verse two says, “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.”

Remember, when your dreams and promises appear to be as good as dead – yet they breathe. Aron Ralston wandered out of the dessert after cutting off his own arm. Eric Nerhus fishes again. Childless Abraham, whose body the Bible says was as good as dead, became the father of a nation.

Senior adult groups have many adorable names. One of my favorites is the ADY – Ain’t Dead Yet – Club. Circumstances may conspire to make you feel you’re as good as dead, but guess what.

You Ain’t Dead Yet.

I was sooo close

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A soft chitter and frantic flutter caught my ear while I rested in the workshop.from the heat outdoors. It took me a moment to isolate the sound and identify a little bird, maybe a wren, pushing desperately against a nine-pane window near the roof line, above a set of double doors.

Somehow it had flown into the workshop when a door was open while I was retrieving a tool, or restringing the weed whacker or just left the door open while mowing grass. The workshop is a large room above the horse stalls. When the bird wearied of pressing fruitlessly against the glass, it flew to other windows, assuming one of them may be the portal to freedom.

I opened the entry door on the other side of the room, through which it probably entered. Then I opened the double door immediately below the bird, through which we lift large bales of hay or bags of feed from ground level. So, immediately below the bird, and behind it, are real openings through which it can fly to freedom.

Instead, it kept pushing against the glass, banging its head, pecking its beak, slapping with its wings, struggling to reach the sky and trees it plainly sees, rather than leaving that vision and discovering either open door.

Its goal was in sight and its limited understanding kept it from grasping the effect of the transparent barrier that was keeping the goal inaccessible. He could see it and there was no visible reason why he shouldn’t be able to reach it. But instead of stepping back and evaluating, it kept pressing because bird logic told him he ought to be able to fly to those trees.

I scooted it away from the window with a long pole, making it fly about the large room, thinking it would look for another way out and would surely see the open double door a mere foot beneath the window that kept resisting it.

It didn’t. It chose to keep banging its head against the window, its eyes fixed on the wide open spaces it could not physically attain.

How many times has your goal been in sight, seemingly close enough to touch? But some invisible barrier kept you from realizing it and you never thought to simply back up, look for another entry point, another starting line?

You can continue to beat your head against the glass wall, making no progress. Or try a different approach. Inhale. Back up. Reevaluate. Look around. Listen.

The bird wouldn’t give up on the destination it saw through the glass. It never realized the single path to its chosen goal was impossible. It died trying, rather than backing up to find the open door.

Don’t be like the bird.

Rod Stewart is 80! What does that make me?

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I burst out laughing recently when I saw on the waiting room table the June/July issue of AARP magazine, the publication from what was once known as the American Association of Retired Persons.

On the cover, reverberating in neon colors, a knowing smirk and dust mop hair was Rod Stewart, the English rocker whose music dominated the sound track of my freshman year at Luther College.

The perennial young superstar is now 80 years old. But his penetrating eyes and feline, ready to pounce stage pose triggered aural memories as if I was still having nightmares about missing a test for a class I never attended and wondering why in the world I enrolled in 8 a.m. speech. 

“Maggie May” was Stewart’s break out song, originally released on the “B” side of the single “Reason to Believe.” It was practically on loop at the local radio station. Or if you couldn’t wait for it to come on after the next commercial, you just needed to walk down Ylvisaker dorm hall to hear it emanating from behind a door. 

For a naïve college freshman, away from his little farming community home for the first time, the song’s lament of a young man trying to leave an older friend who became a lover struck a fantastical chord.

“You led me away from home, just to save you from being alone,” the song says. Here I was, away from home and feeling very alone. 

“It’s late September and I really should be back in school.” Hey, it’s September and there I was, in school.

I wasn’t a rock and roll fan. The Carpenters, James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkel were more my speed. And frankly, I didn’t and don’t like Stewart’s gravelly voice. But even while writing this piece, “Maggie May” is an ear worm I can’t stop humming. 

My problem with seeing Rod Stewart on the cover of AARP magazine at age 80 is that in 1971 he was just a few years older than me. And now, he’s 80. What does that make me?

We all have triggers that remind us of how we’re aging. I think of the story of a woman who looked into the window at a hair salon and saw one of her classmates from 30 years ago. She was shocked at how the woman had aged.

She went in to say hello, introduce herself and remind her they were in school at the same time. “Oh,” the woman said. “What did you teach?”

“The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age,” Stewart sang.

I laughed at that line in 1971, about the sun revealing age. I still didn’t shave every day and was aggravated that I looked so much younger than I actually was. People thought i was a kid. Other guys had sideburns I envied because I just knew a strip of beard down the side of my face was the key to getting girls. 

I’ve matured from that, to the fact that I’m replacing all the mirrors in my house because they don’t work. I don’t know if the batteries are spent or what. But I’m certain the image they reflect is not the image I present.

I check the obituaries for any familiar names. There I see brief summaries encapsulating lives lived and lost that ended at ages younger than me. Persons both famous and anonymous whose roads on this earth ran shorter than the path I trod are signing off. Bon voyage.

Fifty-year anniversaries are cropping up. First, high school graduation, then getting drafted, then college. My wedding. Friends’ weddings, friendships started, events I participated in a half century ago.

About the time Rod Stewart struck it big with Maggie May.

‘Nothing lasts like it used to’

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I once took it as irrefutable truth that “Nothing lasts like it used to.”

For the most part, I agreed that manufacturers were “building in obsolescence” so you’ll have to replace that refrigerator you’ve had for 25 years with a new one you can expect to last only 10 at best.

It’s easier and cheaper to replace appliances than it is to repair them. Good for the manufacturers, bad for service repairmen.

Credit that brief functional life to plastic parts. While it may take 10,000 years to decay in the landfill, plastic in the essential workings of everyday products seem to decay in 10 months. Plastic is so pervasive that we don’t even realize how many items that once were made were made with metal or wood and were strong enough to become heirlooms are now made with plastic and won’t get your kid through kindergarten.

To start a list of all things plastic would require more capacity than my computer has. You may be reading this through lenses held to your nose with plastic frames. You bring home groceries in plastic bags, or get fast food through your car window in plastic containers. Plastic is often useful but nothing plastic can be expected to last long enough for your child to use it as an adult.

Yet, I’m still using an electric grinder my dad used to sharpen the ax he handed me to split firewood. A brass lawn sprinkler I finally sprung for has outlasted a dozen plastic sprinklers.

So yes, I agreed for the most part that “Nothing is built to last” anymore. But then I thought of shoelaces.

Remember when you had to replace shoelaces? When you had to keep extras on hand because they always broke just when you were hurriedly tying a knot to catch the bus for school? Or when you’re trying to get your gym shoes on for phys ed?

And weren’t the only shoelaces available in the catch-all drawer never the color or length you needed? Lots of white laces in the draw when you needed black and vice versa. Don’t even talk to me about brown.

Now the laces in my shoes, from court shoes, to hiking boots to dress shoes outlast the shoes themselves. My sole was falling off my 35-year old Vasque Sundowner hiking boots, but the laces are unfrayed. How DO they do that?

And cars.

Car buffs wax nostalgic about the autos of our youth, but our love affair with those massive, ungainly hunks of American steel was more about style than quality or agility. They burned gas like the sun burns hydrogen.

I became a writer because I couldn’t fix cars. All my buddies, it seemed, knew how to adjust a carburetor, or set the gap on a spark plug, or adjust the timing belt. I knew where the gas went. And I could change a tire.

But, what future awaited in my rural Wisconsin community if I knew nothing about cars and didn’t have a farm to inherit? Cars are another thing better today than a generation ago. Even Car and Driver magazine says, “Cars these days are made to last much longer than those produced even a few decades ago.” Reason being, “car parts are now constructed to withstand more wear than in the past.”

New cars are basically computers on wheels. Electronic eyes can keep a safe distance between you and the car ahead; can keep your vehicle centered in the lane; go 5,000-7000 miles between oil changes; are just getting warmed up at 100,000 miles on the odometer.

Of course, people are driving more today. Commutes of 45 minutes each way are common and longer distances are not unheard of. But no one had 100,000 miles on a car when I was a kid. A guy would hesitate to buy a used car with half that mileage.

 And then there is the elastic that holds up my socks, and keeps my boxer briefs from falling off my hips. My socks never stayed up when I was a kid, and the elastic waistband in my underwear didn’t last many rounds through the wringer washer before they collapsed in their effort to stay aloft.

Today the elastic in my socks could cut off my circulation and that in my waistband could be a tourniquet for an elephant’s mangled leg.

So, it’s not true that nothing is as good or as long lasting as it once was. And if you argue about it, I’m going to throw my Walkman at you and tie you to the broken fridge in my garage.

Going to need extra chairs

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Me in the middle, with Janet and Bill in 2021.

When my grandmother died in 1979, I drove my young wife and one-month old son from our home in Nashville, TN to the funeral in Wisconsin. Grandma was young enough to have a large funeral, just 72 years old. My age.

Of course, in Rio, WI, population 788, funerals were as big a social event as Friday night football at the field in Fireman’s Park. I didn’t play football. I ran cross country instead, which I convinced myself was harder.

But I was at the football games, either running the sideline keeping stats, or in the stands playing “CHARGE” on my trombone.

After grandma’s funeral service at Redeemer Lutheran, one of six churches in town – equal to the number of bars – everyone gathered in the church basement for a lunch prepared by women of the church. Because the meal was free, and there wasn’t much else happening in town that day, the room was crowded.

My wife was most concerned with the one-month old son not accustomed to the noise and crowd and whose only real concern was keeping his tummy full and his diaper dry. So, he started fussing and wailing and that’s not the sound you want to hear piercing the din of chattery family members chowing down on store bought dinner rolls filled with a slice of ham and a slab of butter, potato salad and red Jell-O with marshmallows.

Suddenly, from across the entire fellowship hall, packed hip to hip at the folding tables, my aunt Janet yelled, “Give that boy some titty!”

Now, in another context other than a rural Wisconsin farming community, that comment might have seemed out of place, even impolite. Certainly it caused all the blood in my wife’s body to flush to her toes and then recongregate in her face, making her flush a brighter red than the Rio High School Vikings mascot. But, it also gave her the freedom to excuse herself, find a quiet Sunday School classroom, and take care of our son’s immediate need.

Aunt Janet died this week, at age 91. She was my mother’s last surviving sibling and mom preceded her in death by 29 years. They were two of eight siblings, prompting my grandpa McFarlane to say he had “Two and a half-dozen children.” When grandma McFarlane died, petty sibling grievances broke familial bonds and later on, as one sibling after another died, obituaries did not list all surviving family members, as if they never existed.

But Aunt Janet was always a friend, in part due to the loquacious character of her husband, Bill, a former police officer and much longer a seed corn salesman who knew every farmer and what they needed most. Bill preceded her in death by three years.

I confess Janet’s was the first bare breast I ever saw, as I stood wide-eyed at age five while she fed her first born son, Mark, a man who grew up to be a Presbyterian pastor, nurtured as he was on the milk of human kindness. He could preach from I Peter 2, “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation.”

Janet and Bill had five children and 10 grandchildren and money never flowed like water over Niagara. Janet always put her hand to the wheel to find additional resources, driving school bus for more than two decades and making wedding cakes for lucky brides and grooms.

She looked at driving bus as ministry, taking the opportunity to offer a bright, encouraging word to children with dour faces, lifting heavy, reluctant feet up the step on the way to school.

She was certain of opinion and ready with advice.

When Janet learned my cousin Allen smoked, she asked if he would rather kiss a girl or an ashtray. Allen, sarcastically defending his nasty habit, told me he responded “Ashtray.” He’s since grown beyond that – both in girls and habit.

 Janet and Bill built a house on a hill overlooking that of her mother Eva and she was diligent in looking after her mother to the end. Eva –my grandmother on my mother’s side – expressed concern that bad weather would limit the size of her funeral. She was mentally comparing her eventual celebration to the big crowd that showed up for her husband’s sendoff. In her mind, her funeral would suffer by comparison and somehow that would reflect negatively on her life.

Though such comparison is a false equivalency, if every person whose life Janet affected positively were to attend her funeral, ushers will need to bring in extra chairs.

Two Ways To Do It

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I grew up working with and for my Norwegian bachelor farmer uncle Donnie, who made a living milking 19 cows on 80 sandy acres in southern Wisconsin. As a kid I tried to impress him with my strength by carrying 40 pound buckets of milk to the cooling tank when I didn’t weigh much more than twice that. I struggled to make it look easy, but he knew it took all I had.

I get to practice what i learned while young at White Horse Farm in Pennsylvania, where my son’s family lives.

In the ‘60s corn had to be cultivated to keep the weeds down before “poison ready” genetically modified seed became the norm. So I’d sit on the tractor with Don as he drove the little plows through two rows at a time to dig out the weeds. If he hit a stone or lost concentration and the cultivator dug out some corn, I’d hop off, stick it back into the ground, and run to catch up.

Building or repairing barbed wire fence, learning how to drive tractor and truck, milk a cow and slop a pig, being rewarded with a chocolate milk and donut at the Midget Kitchen on Hwy. 16 all were part of my kinetic education – along with learning how to understand the punchline of coarse jokes.

Once I reached about age 13 my services were much in demand by local farmers who needed help detasseling corn, baling hay, picking stones or cleaning out stalls and stables. I was a tall, thin kid who was young Sheldon in the classroom and who saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mirror.

Our local farmers were basically one-man-and-a-son operations, and I replaced the boy who had grown and gone to the city. To make hay while the sun shined, we cut the alfalfa, let it dry for three days and hoped for no rain. Then we raked it into windrows, scooped it up and compacted it into 40-50 pound bales with a tractor pulling a baler pulling a wagon with a kid on the wagon stacking the bales.

Most generally it was me and the farmer – baling, loading, unloading onto an elevator and stacking in the barn. There were two kinds of farmers when it came to engaging my services on a hot summer day. One I’ll call Uncle Donnie’s way, on account of it’s about my Uncle Donnie. The other I could call “the efficient way,” on account of it’s the opposite of my Uncle Donnie.

When Uncle Don picked me up in the morning, we’d get to the farm and have to gas up the tractor, grease the baler and put in baling twine, hook the baler to the tractor, connect the power takeoff shaft and move the elevator into position to carry the bales up into the hay mow. It wasn’t unusual for us to have round up a wagon or two that a neighbor farmer had borrowed.

All the while I’m looking at all that hay, laying expectantly in windrows in the field, itching to get out there and get started, knowing it was going to be a long day. And it was threatening to rain.

Farmers committed to “the efficient way” and to getting all the work out of me they could, completed all the preliminaries before I got there. The baler was greased and hooked to the tractor, which was gassed and ready. The elevator was in place, all the necessary wagons were lined up, and mother had lunch in the oven.

We got twice as much done in half the time. And there are few things as satisfying as looking over a freshly harvested field, seeing it cut and clean and all the hay is in the barn before the rain comes.

That, and the fact that the more efficient farmers tended to pay $1.25 an hour, rather than $1.00.

Readiness makes the difference. Many of you work with non-profit organizations. Respect the time of your volunteers. Don’t let them show up on a work day or at a fund raising event and have to stand around and twiddle their thumbs. If they are volunteer tutors, have a student already selected and matched.

Then, let it rain.