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?”
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.
My mother-in-law, during last days in nursing care.
In August 1971 anonymous government functionaries conducted a lottery to determine the order in which 19-year-old boys would be drafted into the Army, thousands of them eventually to die in the politicians’ war in Viet Nam.
They drew my birthday first. No. 1. It was the only thing I’ve ever “won” except a case of beer at the Rio Fireman’s Picnic, and the hand of my wife. I was too young to claim the beer, and my wife was almost too young to marry.
From that day on, the musical hit “One” by Three Dog Night became the soundtrack of my life as I went off to college, hoping to get a semester in before I received my draft notice. It’s resounding assertion that “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” pounded time after time out of my reel-to-reel tape player, putting to music the angst of a life on hold.
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…
“It’s just no good anymore since you went away
“Now I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday.”
Then the resounding, pounding refrain:
“One is the loneliest number
“One is the loneliest number
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.”
Every time that song surfaced on the radio or in sequence on my Three Dog Night album, I sank emotionally. No. 1 in the lottery. Draft certain. One is the loneliest number. The saddest experience.
Thoughts of “one” and being alone jumped at me recently while I stood in line for a table at southeastern America’s food oasis, Cracker Barrel. It hit me when the hostess asked the lady ahead of me, “How many?” and she responded, “One.” The loneliest number.
A sudden sadness for her and others being alone hit me like a gut punch through a curtain of memory.
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do. And it’s a growing trend in America. We’re in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just aging widows and widowers. It’s younger people isolated by screens who possess no ability to communicate with real, live people.
Lacking meaningful, human to human connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to an advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
We once called on a young man who visited our church to encourage him to become involved. He said he walks into his apartment on Friday night after work and doesn’t leave it until Monday morning. Week after week. Crawling out to visit the single adult class we led was a major effort.
I don’t equate “being alone” with loneliness or depression, but community involvement and social interaction is the leading indicator for health in senior adults. Of course many single adults lead vigorous, joyful, involved lives and God bless them.
It’s just that as I approach my 48th wedding anniversary I know the deep satisfaction life with a loving partner brings. I think of the shared joys, sorrows and triumphs of raising our three children, and of their loving spouses and our seven grandchildren. I would wish that common good for anyone.
Beyond that, what are the implications for a society in which so many of its members live as single, unaffiliated, isolated souls? Think – as I’m sure they are – of long term health, housing, community, end of life?
And yet, one out of four of today’s 50-year-olds will have been single their whole lives. Never married, never partnered.
Social isolation is associated with a higher risk of dementia and other serious health problems in older adults — while having positive social relationships can help people live longer, healthier lives.
In other parts of the world, nearly four in ten older adults live with extended family, an arrangement that mitigates aloneness. But older adults in the U.S. rarely live with family.
Our culture almost demands we go it alone, that we not “need” anyone or anything. Yet that is not the preferred condition of most single adults I know.
And when the person ahead of me is asked, “How many?” her “One,” sounds like the saddest experience she’ll ever do.
Oh good grief, will that lady please sit down so the rest of us can see?
I’m at the spring school concert for one of my grandchildren, who is dressed in white shirt and dark pants somewhere on the third row, right side, there, in the shadow, just beyond the edge of the light. Yeah, him. Take your finger out of your nose, buddy.
But the lady, and a dozen others, are making it hard to see my kid at all because they keep popping up, holding cameras, iPads, and phones at arm’s length to record their little darlings’ anonymous instant. Me, I’m trying to sit back, focus, and be in the moment so that the images and sounds in real time are seared into my memory.
I won’t need to pull up a grainy, dark, blurry picture to remember the grainy, dark, blurry image of the event I saw – through a viewfinder.
Studies show you will remember something better and appreciate it more if you concentrate on the moment with your own eyes, instead of looking at it through a viewfinder.
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological science professor at the University of California, Irvine, says when our concentration at an event is to record it, it’s like we are offloading the responsibility of memory from our brain to our phones. Or, we’re so distracted by the photo taking process that we miss the moment altogether.
People upload 30,000 hours of content to YouTube – every hour.
I’m not sure if there is an exact parallel to the “losing the moment to a photo” idea, but I’ve discovered a strange phenomenon relating to journaling and memory. I’ve been transcribing my handwritten notes from journals of 50 years ago when I was in the army. Everything was new and not so wonderful for a young, pacifist country boy who grew up in a town of 788 people now thrust into a world of strangers being trained to kill people.
Still, there were friends, events, churches, girls and Kodak moments from those years that I’ve shared with people ever since. Special moments, meaningful events and forks in the pathway of my journey seared into my memory.
Yet, I’ve discovered that many of the most memorable, transformative, fulfilling moments of those days went completely unmentioned in my journals. Stories that made it through my memory dozens of times during the past half century never made it through my pen.
When I first realized the omissions, it struck me as strange. What I’ve come to believe, in a totally unscientific insight, is that I didn’t write down such significant things because I knew they were so memorable I’d never forget them. Things like:
My first ski trip when we encountered girls from church at the top of Monarch Mountain. It was my first day on skis and I’d done well and wanted to impress them. After we chatted a minute, we all turned to go down the hill and I immediately fell. Trying to catch up, I fell again and didn’t see them the rest of the day.
After wearing a full leg cast from a ski injury I had my buddy drive me to the base hospital to get it off, carrying my bike along with us so I could ride it home. Ha. My leg was useless until I’d rehabbed it.
A spur of the moment trip to Tacoma to see a girl I’d met through her cousin in Wisconsin.
After saving for a big ski trip to Vail, buddies Steve, Paul and I brought a fourth, Dennis, from Florida. He hadn’t skied, but said he was a surfer, so we thought if he could surf, he could ski. Wrong. After sleeping in the heatless van in the parking lot, waking to a quarter inch of frost inside the windows, we spent the morning at Vail, the premier ski area in Colorado, with him on the bunny slope. He never got it and we abandoned him.
Or, feeling compelled to back out of a trip to San Antonio to see a friend I’d met when stationed there, feeling I shouldn’t go. Hours after I was to leave, my mom called to say my cousin Dickie had died in a one-car accident. I went home to Wisconsin instead.
So, what prompts recollection of these events as I transcribe my journals? As I’ve gone through chronological entries, little butterflies flap around in my mind, whispering, “Didn’t this or that happen about this time?” We are an accumulation of our memories and each works in some kind of symbiotic relationship with others.
It’s kind of like how the things we eat work together in our bodies for nutrition and health. Who knows how an orange releases enzymes from a pork chop? Or how fish digests better with a glass of white wine?
I don’t. But thinking about why I wrote about fairly mundane things without recording events I considered very significant then and since makes me scratch my head.
Now, please scooch aside ma’am…I need to get this pic.
The snow outside church portended a brutal night and I watched the parking lot as much as I watched the costumed kids preparing for their role in the Christmas pageant. I expected the arrival of a new helper who was racing south from Colorado ahead of a blizzard.
She was a helper whose arrival I anticipated with mixed emotions.
I had been a volunteer at Templo Bautista in Espanola, NM for two months. Recently discharged from the Army as one of America’s last draftees, I’d gone there to exercise my faith with the goal of making a difference in an environment foreign to me, a Midwestern Scandinavian who grew up in Truman’s World.
Is it any wonder I wanted no intruders? Teresita Naranjo, left, recognized as the No. 2 potter in all of New Mexico, cut my hair with Mrs. Abbott.
Mrs. John Abbott – never Ethel – carried on the work at Templo that she and her husband started decades earlier. But John had been killed in a farming accident and Mrs. Abbott told God she could only carry on as God would send help.
Enter me.
I was the first long term helper and became bus driver, Sunday School teacher, wood splitter, phone tree operator, youth director, visitation director and encourager. Life was good. Mrs. Abbott treated me like a son, fed me like a king and taught me like Socrates.
Two months later I returned to the church I attended in Colorado Springs to tell my crowd what was happening in Espanola, and to raise a few bucks to buy Christmas gifts for the kids there. In that crowd was the daughter of a man I knew well. She had just left college and was at loose ends, struggling to discern a broader, greater plan for her life.
My heartfelt appeal and enthusiasm for life at Templo Bautista struck a chord in her heart and she wanted to pray with me about the possibility of coming to help. The last thing I wanted was an intruder to dilute my lone role as Golden Child in Mrs. Abbott’s realm.
But, we prayed and this girl and I had the unmitigated gall, the brazen audacity, the cocksure brass to demand the creator of the universe provide a clearly discernible answer within seven days.
I returned to Espanola with some cash for gifts and a secret. I didn’t want my apple cart upset. I wasn’t going to stand in God’s way, but I wasn’t going to feed him an easy assist, either.
So I waited several days before telling Mrs. Abbott about Sue Ellen Carver’s interest in coming to help. I figured Mrs. Abbott would take a couple days to pray, to cogitate and consider. By then, the seven-day deadline would be passed and I’d be home free. So, at breakfast on the sixth day, I mentioned casually that Bob Carver’s daughter, Sue Ellen, was interested in coming to Templo to help.
“Bob Carver’s daughter?” she asked. Bob had been to Templo many times on weekend work trips and was a member of a very supportive church.
And yet, who could blame me for my resistance fading?
I nodded, smug in my manipulation of the calendar. To my dismay, Mrs. Abbott reached for the phone, asked me for Sue Ellen’s number, called it and said, “Come on.”
“OK,” I thought. “It’s a couple weeks before Christmas, and she’ll have to give notice at her job and make arrangements and well, maybe I’ve got three to four weeks before the invasion.
Instead, within three days she was on the road, racing a winter storm south from Colorado to New Mexico, sliding into the median, using every ounce of knowledge her dad gave her about rocking the car to get out of a drift, crossing Raton Pass just before it was closed and arriving at Templo Bautista just as the shepherds and angels were marching through the hallway to line up for their part in announcing good news to a waiting world.
She arrived covered in frost with a smile that would melt many a heart just as the kids were shuffling down the hallway to the stage. It was a Christmas pageant scene so perfect that it would have embarrassed even Hallmark.
Over the following months, we worked daily together. Eventually, of course, I began to see Sue Ellen far less as a nuisance and far more as someone I wanted to know on a far more personal level. Sure, she was the only green-eyed blonde in Sante Fe County, but just as attractive was her indomitable, loving spirit that pitched in enthusiastically to every task and made every person who crossed her path feel like they’ve been heard, seen and loved.
Whatever it was, we left Espanola heading in different directions and had only occasional, long distance conversation until in October the following year, she came to Oklahoma Baptist University to visit her sister and we reconnected. We talked for hours – much to the dismay of her sister, who felt neglected. We talked of our own perspectives of the future, who we were and who we wanted to be, never really talking about that future together.
Yet, when I returned to my apartment after seeing her off to the airport, I knew. The next morning I called her dad and said “I want to marry your daughter.” To which he replied, “Which one?” He had four and he had no clue Sue Ellen and I had been talking.
One month later we returned to Espanola for the first time – to plan our wedding, which took place one month after that.
I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, but none were better than that one 47 years ago.
John earned the shrapnel lodged in his legs, making them ache when the weather changed, when he labored in the fields. When he remembered.
As a battlefield chaplain during World War II, John Abbot worked among wounded and dying American soldiers in Europe fighting the scourge of Nazism. His was an active faith. He believed he incarnated Jesus as he walked, crawled and bled among soldiers who needed assurance that God loved them and that their destiny was assured.
Author as jack of all trades in Espanola, after the Army, before finishing college.
When he returned from the blood-soaked fields of Europe and as America shifted gears to embrace a new, wide open world of possibility, John applied to Southern Baptists’ missionary support agency responsible for “home” missions – or missions within the continental United States. He wanted to be a missionary in his native southwest, serving people, showing them the way of Jesus and leading them to faith.
He was a committed churchman in that denomination and after his service as a chaplain in the military, he assumed that he would be approved for support so he could turn his attention to the purposes of that agency: winning people to faith in Jesus.
Instead, he was denied support because he was deemed medically unsound, due to the shrapnel in his body, lodged there in battle. Disappointed, but undaunted and illuminated by his own vision, John secured support from some Texas Baptist churches where he was known. He bought farm equipment and set up shop in a converted dance hall in Espanola, New Mexico, a small town 25 miles north of Santé Fe.
The dance hall occupied a strategic corner on the main road between Espanola and Chimayo, a tiny town that houses one of only two places on earth that claim to contain healing elements. It’s the dirt in Chimayo, and the waters in Lourdes, France, to which pilgrims crawl. Discarded crutches, canes and bandages testify to the healing properties of the dirt in the Santuario de Chimayo. People have crawled from Santé Fe to Chimayo to do penance before applying the dirt to their injury or illness.
On the north side of the windy, two-lane road between the two towns perched a wooden church, little larger than a garden shed. It was the focal point of religious Penitentes, who marched in a single line, flagellating themselves, seeking forgiveness.
In that environment, John remodeled the dance hall into a church, office, classrooms and an apartment for him and his wife, Ethel, and he utilized the equipment to open doors among the small farmers in the dusty arroyos between Espanola and Chimayo. They could not afford individually field prep and harvest equipment that would increase their yields, and they welcomed the method and message of John Abbott to work among them, to share the work and to share his faith.
With hard work, ingenuity, faith and commitment, John and Ethel started and built a church which membership was primarily Spanish, descendants of Spanish invaders of the 16th century and Native American tribes. They called it Templo Bautista – Baptist Temple.
Then one day in one of those freak accidents that make Christians wonder if God is paying attention, a piece of equipment that John was working under fell off its jack and crushed him. I guess he was medically unsound after all.
Ethel was suddenly a widow. Much of her livelihood disappeared because she could not run the equipment. John was the pastor, breadwinner, husband, visionary, guide, energy behind the entire effort. I don’t know how old Ethel was. She always seemed old to me, but I was just 20 when I met her. I’m sure I’m older now than she was then.
She promised God she would stay at Templo, would continue the work, if God would send her help. Because of her winsome spirit and compelling stories, Ethel received a fairly regular trickle of weekend or week-long helpers to lead special events and do repair work around the ancient facility. But she needed an everyday helper.
Her prayer and mine – what to do now that I’m getting out of the Army – clanged together in God’s ear and I became that first long-term helper. I was a pale, nerdy Scandihoovian from Wisconsin, knew zero Spanish and was new in evangelical faith. I’d been drafted into the Army after one year at Luther College and now I was out and at loose ends.
I started in November 1973 as a bus driver, youth minister, preacher, log splitter, painter, floor sander, week-night Bible study leader, and encourager. We called many of our members on Sunday morning to wake them in time to catch the bus I drove.
I brought them to church, preached at them and hauled them home. All this was done with sincere, naive spirit and within a profoundly knit community. The names “Ethel” or “John Abbot” opened any door in the county quicker than an electronic key.
I realize now the way we did church was paternalistic. We expected and required too little of members. There was an easy believe-ism in which membership at Templo eased seamlessly into whatever other influences they were weighing. Part of our motivation with activities was to “keep the kids out of trouble.”
But we slogged on. I went back to my home church in Colorado Springs to tell them of the work in New Mexico, and to raise money for Christmas goody baskets for the kids. One young lady was struck by the need, by the opportunity and by my wistful pleas. A few weeks later she arrived as a second helper, in the midst of a snow storm, as the children were trekking down the hallway in their angel and wise men costumes to present the Christmas story.
Her arrival on that snowy night declared that what I’d thought to be the first chapter of this story was merely prologue.
Then, my wife looked baffled when I drank a beer at 10 a.m. She was downright befuddled when, at 11 a.m., I ate a piece of blueberry pie, and asked at noon if she had any apple pie in the house.
When I wanted a big, juicy, fried pork chop to eat while standing under a shade tree, she was bewildered, but she finally blew up when I went for ice cream at 1 p.m.
It’s true. Spending a week on my bike with my three adult children and my best buddy from the Army – and 10,000 of our closest friends – riding across Iowa in the oldest, longest and largest group ride in the world does recalibrate my sense of propriety.
Seven days of riding over 470 miles ends with a tire dip in the Mississippi River in Clinton, IA.
I mean, who flushes after using a kybo? (Kybo is the RAGBRAI term for a porta-john, coined by Australians, or, as the acronym that Boy Scouts appropriated for it, Keep Your Bowels Open)
And, a beer by 10 a.m. is appropriate because by then we’ve ridden 40-50 miles and the temperature already is 90 degrees with humidity approaching sauna level.
Pie? Pie makes the world go around, and provides the dietary fruit necessary to make kybo visits regular. It seems every church on the route has conscripted their resident grandmothers to make pies to raise money for roofs, mission trips or video equipment.
Army buddy Steve likes pie as much as I do.
Mr. Pork Chop is one of several food vendors that position themselves each day at a distance from the start appropriate for their particular specialty. You could always find Farm Kids in time for breakfast, and Beekman’s homemade ice cream was near enough to the day’s finish to justify a satisfying stop.
This was my fourth RAGBRAI and first since 2013. What made it special for me was riding it with my kids, who live in three different states, and my Army buddy, who lives in Nebraska. We covered nearly 500 miles in seven days, starting at the Missouri River in Le Mars on the west side, and riding a serpentine route east to Clinton, where we dipped our tires in the Mississippi River.
Beekman’s Speciality ice cream was always a popular afternoon stop.
Iowa possesses its own beauty. The relentless corn fields roll endlessly to either side of us, their golden tassels wafting in the breeze like small waves in open ocean. They also provide handy a kybo experience for those who can’t make it to the next town, given the likelihood of a long waiting line. Just be sure to go at least four rows deep.
When my daughter yelled, “Keep going, Dad,” another rider at the rest stop sprayed his mouthful of pickle juice all over the grass. Some guys need to go deeper than others.
Each night thousands of RAGBRAI riders pitched their tents in villages with populations dwarfed by our swarm. It seems every town had railroad tracks on which ran trains whose engineers enjoyed sounding the piercing whistle way too much.
A couple of nights featured local infantile knuckle draggers screaming past the campgrounds, blowing air horns and shouting some nonsense about what idiots we were and what nasty things we supposedly did to our mothers. But the joke was on them. The trains already made sure we weren’t sleeping, anyway.
The week was exceptionally hot, in the high 90s every day until the last. One day our campsite was in an open field, just across a gravel drive from a graveyard where a big shade tree held open its arms.
Our little clan erected five tents beneath that tree, in close proximity to graves. The practical temperature in the sun was 106 degrees and it was more like 90 under the shade. We were grateful, and heard no complaints from our immediate neighbors.
The lone shade in Waterloo turned out to be off limits.
But, someone who didn’t like us there protested to someone they deemed to have authority and that someone asked us kindly to move. We refused. When he asked if we’d prefer to get the police involved, we said, “OK.”
Slinking five minutes later into our shade, while the complainers sat in their car 10 feet away with the air conditioner running, the young policeman obviously hated to hold the conversation we forced him to have. We bantered cordially back and forth about rules, property,trespass, and lease agreements, neither of us convinced of the other’s position.
He pulled out what he thought was his ace in the hole when he asked, “How would you like it if it was YOUR mother or grandmother here and you were camping at their gravesite?”Simultaneously, all five of us said, “They would LOVE it.”
Ultimately, we decided a night in jail – even in an air-conditioned cell – wasn’t worth the hassle, so we moved our tents across the drive, 20 feet. We needed to get cool, so we decided to hitch a ride to an air-conditioned restaurant in Waterloo. After several quizzical looks by drivers who wondered how in the world we thought FIVE people could catch a ride, one lady in a big red pickup stopped. She had just come from the same cemetery where she was visiting with and praying for her recently departed husband, and she was curious about what the hundreds of people and tents were doing there.
When we said we were riding through Iowa and were staying there that night, she said, “Hallelujah, David will have some company tonight.”
It’s all about perspective, isn’t it?
As great a time as I had with my kids and buddy, riding 70 miles a day through several small towns, each of which threw us a party, the highlight came the last day as we navigated the rolling hills approaching Clinton. My team, The Jameson Jockeys, was riding close together and I punched it on a long downhill, tucking in and rolling past my oldest son.
Eastern Iowa on sixth day of riding.
He later told me he saw “an old guy” riding past him down that hill, which was his first surprise. But then he thought, “That guy has a bike like dad’s.” Then he realized, “It IS dad.” And my ride, day and week were made.
This is just the tip of what a week of RAGBRAI is like, not to mention the miles and smiles, temporary friends and cornfields that never end, the heavy heat and rough streets. There is no way to explain it, even to a long-suffering spouse who is doing her best to help me through re-entry into normal life.
But, she did put her foot down when I programmed the white noise sound track in our bedroom to be a train whistle.
Members of the Rio, WI high school graduating class of 1971. Not a bald head among them.
Confession up front: before my 50th high school class reunion in June I looked over my year book to reacquaint myself with the names – and cherubic faces – of those from my class who might appear.
Having delivered our graduates’ speech as valedictorian of our 53-member class five decades earlier, I was asked to “say a few words” on this very convivial night, decades past the gateway to a dream that seemed to open to us in 1971. We’re also decades past having to color our palette of life, careers, marriages, successes or failures in hues that confirmed that we’d “made it.”
So, I talked about “making it,” and memories.
Members of our class were born in 1952 or 1953. I mentioned notable characters born in those years, including Vladimir Putin, Patrick Swayze, Liam Neeson, George Strait, Floyd Mayweather, Mr. T and Roseanne Barr, Hulk Hogan, Cyndi Lauper, Pierce Brosnan and Tim Allen.
We remember these politicians and entertainers because in our minds and in our culture, they “made it.” They are rich and famous, at the top of their respective fields. Say their names and people know who you are talking about.
“Did we make it?” I asked. “Are we making it?”
I was pleased to hear an immediate “Darned right,” from Jerry, our star athlete who was an all-conference football player in college and who has concluded his career in insurance, primarily among farmers in two counties.
No matter what we think “making it” means, I know we all have a different perspective on that than we did 50 years ago – or even 20 years ago. Success? Riches? Fame? Security? Family? Love? Inventions?
My 1971 high school graduation picture. Naive, hopeful, eager.
Fifty years of sandblasted life later, mostly in Baptist communications.
Except for seven months, I’ve never lived closer than 600 miles from either my parents or my in-laws. My quest to “make it” took me from state to state. I’ve lived twice in Texas, twice in Oklahoma, twice in Colorado, in Tennessee and now North Carolina. My daughter was six when we moved to North Carolina and North Carolina was her fourth state to live in.
I came home annually to visit – and as long as my dad lived, Rio was always “home.” For the longest time, I thought “making it” meant anything away from Rio, population 788. My dad always told me Rio’s population stayed at 788 because any time a young woman had a baby, an older man left town.
Looking across the room I saw vibrant senior adults, many of whom never left the area, and all of whom have “made it.” They stayed, invested themselves, coached the local teams, served on the school board, nurtured the children of other families, and offered their voices of wisdom among their peers. They’ve been important to many lives.
Reunions are the fertile soil in which the seeds of memory planted much earlier blossom and flower. We harvested those blooms at our 50th.
We remember moments, rather than days, as philosopher Cesare Pavese said. We all have memories of high school. Some we share, others are unique because none of us lived the same life. And the best part of those remembered moments are the people we shared them with.
Writer and theologian Frederick Buechner said, “When you remember me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me.”
And we want to be known. And remembered. Someone has said you die twice: first, when your heart stops and you’re buried. The second time you die is the last time someone says your name… whether it’s a year, a decade, or a century.
So, I named the seven members of our class who are with us no longer. They remain alive in our memories.
Then we had fun recalling not only the names of our teachers, but some of their idiosyncrasies: the teacher/coaches who helped athletes with grades; the biology professor we called Bernard the Monk because of his curly bowl haircut and demeanor; the English teacher who the girls always felt was peeking up their skirts.
Gas was only 33 cents a gallon at Bleigh’s service station during high school. I’d drive across town to the Farmer’s Union Co-op if it was 32 cents there. Of course, “across town” was less than a mile, with one stop sign.
Janis Joplin was singing “Me and Bobby McGee” and “The French Connection” competed with “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Dirty Harry” for your $1.50 movie admission.
Living in the south now, I told the class every region has its rednecks, but southerners are special. You know you’re a redneck in the south when you take your dog for a walk and you both use the same tree. Or, when grandma’s wish list includes ammo. Or when you think “The Nutcracker” is something you do off the high dive.
One anomaly I noticed was that not a single person in the room was bald. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, male pattern baldness at some level affects more than 50 percent of all men. It stands to reason that someone would be bereft of hair.
Perhaps humorist Garrison Keillor’s observation of his little hometown of Lake Wobegon – the model of which easily could be Rio, WI – is right. There, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
For all of you who are having reunions and special functions, blessings on every classmate and friend who has “made it” this far. May you have many more years to be a positive influence in your children – who always need their parents – and their children, who more desperately need the positive influence of grandparents now than ever before.
These are the people of our lives, thrust together by time and circumstance, calling up the memories created by moments together. I’m grateful for them.
It was Oct. 13, 1975 and I had two calls to make from my two-room apartment in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The first, was to Bob Carver in Colorado Springs. His time zone was an hour earlier than mine, but if I woke him up, I didn’t care.
“Bob, this is Norman Jameson.”
“Yes?”
“I’m calling for your blessing because I want to marry your daughter.”
“Which one?”
That’s not as odd a question as it might seem. Bob had four beautiful daughters. I had grown quite close to the eldest, Sue Ellen, when we both were volunteers at a Baptist mission in Espanola, NM a year earlier. But then we went our separate ways, me to Oklahoma Baptist University to finish a college career interrupted by the Army. Sue Ellen back home to live and work. Our contact was infrequent.
In the meantime, Bob’s second daughter, Leslie, had come to OBU as a student, more in pursuit of my roommate, Loren, than of a degree. But, she was there, and Sue Ellen wasn’t and Bob hadn’t yet learned of the sudden, unexpected reunion that I had with Sue Ellen the Columbus Day weekend she came to “visit Leslie.”
So, when he asked, “Which one?” the question was legit. For all he knew, Leslie and I were dating. But, my answer was, “Sue Ellen.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes sir.”
“Ok then.” I think he was anxious to get back to sleep.
The widow Ethyl Abbott ran Templo Bautista and stayed as long as the Lord would send her volunteers. Her first two volunteers married each other, on Dec. 27, 1975.
My second call was to Sue Ellen. I asked her over the phone to marry me and she agreed. We saw each other at Thanksgiving in Colorado. We married at Christmas in New Mexico. In that two months, Sue Ellen basically did all the planning and sewed her dress and her bridesmaids’ dresses.
Army buddies from Texas and New Jersey stood up with me. My parents from Wisconsin met Sue Ellen for the first time when they came to the wedding. I don’t think mom fully believed I was getting married until she met Sue Ellen. Once she did, mom would have disowned and dismembered me if I had been fool enough to let her go again.
That was 45 years ago. December 27. Between semesters at OBU. Sue Ellen worked at a local bank to cover groceries and our $65 a month apartment rent. I edited the college paper and paid tuition with the GI Bill.
A year later, she loaded the U-Haul while I made my senior marketing presentation to a local bank, then we drove into the night to Colorado Springs where I had an outside hope of landing a reporter’s job at the Gazette-Telegraph.
We’ve made a lot of interstate moves for work ever since, each one supposedly improving our lot, moving from the newspaper to Nashville, TN where I started a career working mostly for Baptist entities. From Nashville to Texas for seminary, traveling now with two little ones. I didn’t know until we arrived in separate vehicles that Sue Ellen had cried all the way to Texas.
Seminary was the most difficult time of our marriage. Working fulltime and going to school full-time. Leaving for the library at night with my son tugging at my leg. Discovering we had different goals for when we were finished.
One afternoon while agonizing in the combination porch-guest room-laundry room-study of our tiny rent house I cried out to the Lord for clarity of purpose and future. I heard clearly as if God had texted directly to my brain, “Stay in religious journalism.” Within 48 hours the editor of the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger showed up out of the blue and asked me to join his staff. I could finish my seminary degree by extension classes at my alma mater, OBU.
So, it was back to Oklahoma before the fundamentalist effluvium seeped into that state convention and made it untenable for anyone who possessed a contrary thought. We “told” God not to present a professional opportunity that He didn’t want me to take, because I was grabbing the first one that would carry me out of Oklahoma.
Then Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina called, and we crossed the Mississippi with three children. Our daughter was six and North Carolina was her fourth state. We figured to stay two or three years and make our way back west. That was 33 years ago.
We’re in our fourth North Carolina city, or sixth North Carolina house and am retired from my seventh North Carolina job.
45 years later, the years truly are golden and the mystery of oneness remains worthy of continual examination
I say all that to say Happy 45th Anniversary to the bride of my youth who has followed me, encouraged me, supported me, bore our children and taught them how to live, provided incredibly valuable insight and wisdom, sacrificed her own dreams for those of her family and laughed with me to keep me from crying. She’s been a rock, always trusting in the hand of God on our lives, and in me. She makes me a better man.
And she no longer answers her phone to an unidentified caller.
The strange church emptied quickly in the little town where my family was visiting grandpa and grandma at Christmas. Although at age 5 I didn’t really know them, my cousins, aunts and uncles comprised a large portion of the town’s population of 788. We were all at Redeemer Lutheran for Christmas morning service.
At its conclusion, everyone donned coats, scarves, hats and gloves (it was Wisconsin, after all) and headed out the door for the holiday meals and spirit that awaited. Thankfully, although there were lots of Norwegians in town, the traditional meal was still turkey and ham, and not lutefisk and lefse.
I wandered about the pews, looking at the garland and poinsettias, not noticing that the sanctuary was rapidly emptying. When the room grew quiet, I turned to see I was the only one left. The only one. Five years old in a strange church, a foreign town.
It’s no wonder I felt secure. Here, at five, with my dad, Marvin, in 1957.
Even at five I was too secure in the love of my family to panic – much. Surely this was an aberration and someone would drift back into the church to collect me. Dad probably just went out to warm up the car.
Nope.
The furry fingered fear of abandonment started to close around my throat just as organist Olive Shultz, who was closing up the building, came around the corner and spotted me. Since it was only her and me now, she knew I was as misplaced as a snow shovel at the beach.
A large woman, she rustled down the aisle and side-stepped between two pews, leaned over asked, “What is your name?”
“Norman,” I said with some measure of certainty.
“Where are you supposed to be?” she asked.
“Grandpa’s.”
Not enough clue for her, she asked if grandpa had a name. I wouldn’t know grandpa’s name for years but I offered that he was “Grandpa Jameson.”
Given the size of the town and percentage of its populace occupied by my relatives, Olive knew immediately where to take me. She led me to her car and drove briefly down Hwy. 16 to the farm my Norwegian bachelor uncle Don rented, and where he lived with his parents – my grandparents.
I was relieved and grateful as I walked into the bustling living room, a joy that lasted only as long as it took me to realize everyone had just figured out I was not among them, and were arguing about who had get their winter garb back on and go get me!
The next year we moved to that little town, Rio, WI where the population stayed at 788, my dad told me, because every time a young lady had a baby, an older man left town.
Eventually I graduated from high school there, in the same building where I started first grade. But, more about that, later.
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