Posted on by rjonakait

It Was Evening All Afternoon

         It was evening all afternoon. 

          It was snowing 

          And it was going to snow. 

          The blackbird sat 

          In the cedar-limbs. 

Wallace Stevens 

When I change my opinion, I applaud my open mindedness and willingness and ability to learn from experience. But I realize that sometimes the changed mind has come because I have fallen out of touch with the circumstances that helped create the original opinion. Take winter, for example. 

I only knew Wisconsin winters growing up. The family could not afford to travel to warmer climes for even a break in the January or February weather. (I had only left Wisconsin once before going off to college and that was to some sort of church retreat just barely into Illinois. Three hours each way crammed into the back of a Rambler to see people I did not know in some obscure small town did not give me a taste for travel.) 

Did I regard the Wisconsin winters as harsh? Not really. It was all I knew, and I also knew from looking at the newspaper page that printed the temperatures from around the country that winter was colder elsewhere. Indeed, Lake Michigan, a few blocks away from the house, gave Sheboygan a bit of a maritime climate moderating winter weather. Madison, a few degrees of latitude south but nowhere near the great lake, had colder temperatures. And if I really wanted to cheer myself up, I would look up the weather in Minneapolis or Fargo. Now those places really had winter. 

It was only when I went off to college in New Jersey that I began to realize that the seasons, even in the Northern climes, had different meanings in different places. Spring was a delight in New Jersey. It came weeks earlier than I had experienced. It was not just a time of mud from the remaining melting snowbanks. The snow had disappeared before winter had ended. I was seeing New Jersey flowers when Wisconsin still had slush. 

When I moved to New York City I would hear weather reports that would say a winter cold front was a coming bringing “frigid” or “Arctic” temperatures. They were forecasting temperatures that might be eighteen or even fifteen degrees. And then I would scoff. The historical highs for the coldest times of the year in New York City are about thirty-nine degrees with a low of twenty-seven. By contrast, the average low at the end of January where I grew up was fifteen degrees. What was “Arctic” in NYC was just an ordinary morning in Sheboygan. Thus the scoffing. Since I was only a decade away from those Wisconsin mornings, those reasonably fresh memories made the cold of New York winters easy to endure.  

When it snowed in New York, I again thought of my boyhood. I was raised in a modest house on a modest lot, but that modest lot was sixty feet across. That meant shoveling sixty feet of snow from the front sidewalk. But wait, there was more. There was the walk from that sidewalk to our front door, perhaps ten feet and then the porch had to be cleared. And the walk to the backdoor had to be shoveled. It was narrower than the front sidewalk, but at least as long. Then there was the path from the backdoor to the freestanding garage, perhaps twenty feet. And, of course, the driveway had to be shoveled, and that was wide and might have been eighty feet long. I don’t pretend I ever did this by myself. It was a family affair, but after a heavy snowfall, it seemed also to be an all-day affair.  

It was much easier in Brooklyn. Of course, with the higher average temperatures in New York City, precipitation that would have been Wisconsin snow was Brooklyn rain. In addition, however, our row house is twenty-five feet wide. A front stoop which abuts the front sidewalk also has to be cleared, as does a space, perhaps ten feet square outside the lower door. A relative piece of cake that I actually enjoyed doing because the end point, even with the first couple of shovelfuls, always seemed near. 

The snow not only seemed easy to clear, I loved the aftermath of a snowstorm in New York. Although we live in what I consider to be a quiet neighborhood, heavy snow stopped almost all traffic, and the neighborhood then seemed to belong just to me and the neighbors. After a winter storm, a different kind of light settled over the city than at other times, one that brought on a sense of peacefulness. That light and the absence of traffic caused us few pedestrians to treat each other reverentially as if we were the deepest friends on a meditative retreat. A nippy wind may have made cheeks rosy, but stomping on and over the banks of still pristine snow warmed the body as well as the heart. These were the kind of days where I was thrilled that there was a winter and that I was in it. I could relate to what Alexander Pushkin (James E. Falen, translator) wrote in Eugene Onegin: “And all the hilltops soft and glowing/ With winter’s brilliant rug of snow—/ The world all fresh and white below.” 

I admit, however, that, while I can still appreciate the crystal-clear sky of a winter blue that January can bring, I now simply tolerate it. Life has changed. Over time the spouse became more dependent on car travel for work and pleasure, and we park our car on the street. The car has to be dug out to go anywhere after a heavy snow, and finding a dug-out parking space upon return has become harder and harder with more cars in the neighborhood.  

And I, of course, have gotten further and further away from my childhood experiences. While thirty degrees was a nice winter day and twenty degrees is what I could expect most mornings as a kid, that was a long, long time ago. Now below freezing always seems cold and ten degrees below freezing is frigid to this aged body. And snow shoveling no longer produces the sense of accomplishment it once did. It’s just a chore. 

Even so, I don’t have fantasies of living in a warm climate all the time. I do want, however, what I can’t have. I want winter, but I want it to start the week before Christmas and end January 31. Six weeks of winter with cold clear air and some pristine snow that I know will soon disappear is what I want. 

          One must have a mind of winter 

          To regard the frost and the boughs 

          Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;  . . . 

          For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

          And, nothing himself, beholds 

          Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 

Wallace Stevens  

Posted on by rjonakait

The Termination of Roe

          The Supreme Court has terminated Roe v. Wade. Many of the most important consequences of aborting the constitutional right to abortion are obvious, but I have also been thinking about other effects.

          There is a glimmer of good news in the Supreme Court case that overruled Roe v. Wade. The opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization averred that there was no right to abortion specified in the Constitution, but it also held that access to abortion was an issue for the states to decide. I had little doubt that the Court would kill Roe, but I was concerned that in doing so, the majority would suggest that a fetus was a human being. This, of course, is a common view. For example, in an opinion piece in the New York Times published on the day Roe was overruled, Karen Swallow Prior, a research professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that if you believe as she does “that abortion unjustly ends the life of a being that is fully human [Emphasis added], a life that exists independently of the will of the mother, is self-organizing and unique, developing yet complete in itself, then you will understand Roe not as a ruling that liberates but as one that dehumanizes—first the fetus, then the rest of us.”

          People who have beliefs like Prior’s will seek to have states that do not already have laws making abortion criminal to pass them. They will not have success everywhere. I doubt that will be the end of their efforts. When they lose in the state legislatures, they will turn to the courts hoping to get rulings outside the democratic process that a fetus is a human being. If courts ever conclude that, then an abortion would be depriving a life without due process of law. Abortion would be illegal everywhere.

          But right now, there is that small bit of good news that the Dobbs Court held that abortion is an issue for the states.

          A justifiable concern is that with Roe overruled, other Supreme Court precedents that relied on reasoning similar to Roe’s will also fall. Clarence Thomas concurring in Dobbs said that Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) should also be reconsidered, and there is little doubt that he would overrule them all. Alito’s opinion stressed that only abortion was at issue in Dobbs, and Kavanaugh concurring suggested that the Court should not consider other precedents. However, if the Court is consistent, these other decision, too, could be overruled. So what would that mean?

          Obergefell held that there was a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The consequences of striking it down and returning the issue to the states are obvious. Griswold held that married couples had the constitutional right to access birth control, a right that was extended to non-married couples by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird. I don’t imagine that states will rush to outlaw condoms and birth control pills. At the time of Griswold, only Connecticut and Massachusetts had such laws. However, many state legislators have stated an intention to ban the morning-after pill and intrauterine devices under the theory that IUDs and the medication cause abortions. If Griswold is overruled, these laws will be constitutional because states can not only regulate abortion, they can also regulate these forms of contraception.

          Lawrence is thought to hold that laws prohibiting gay sex are unconstitutional. If it is overruled, states could again criminalize this behavior. Lawrence, however, did more than that. Thomas was correct in saying that the case constitutionalized “the right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts.” Some state anti-sodomy laws made oral and anal sex illegal for all people. In these places, married people who engaged in fellatio or cunnilingus were violating the law. Even if Lawrence is overruled, states might not pass such laws again. However, the assumption is that with the fall of Roe, anti-abortion laws that were in effect before Roe and remain on the books are again operative. A similar thing could happen if Lawrence is overruled. Laws still on the books would be back in effect. Gays, and perhaps others, would be breaking the law.

          This makes me think back to my childhood. I read the local newspaper of my town of 45,000 growing up, and I learned early that people were arrested for adultery, fornication, and cohabitation, and some even went to jail. I understood what murder and assault were, but I did not understand these other crimes. I asked the parents what these offenses were. I could tell that my question embarrassed them, and their explanations were vague and filled with hemming and hawing. What I did learn at the age of eight was that at least sometimes I needed a source of knowledge other than the mother and father. So, when there was an arrest for rape reported in the paper, I looked up the definition in a dictionary and I learned that rape was “unlawful carnal knowledge.” That did nothing to further my understanding.

          In the local Sheboygan police reports, it seemed that people were being arrested for such offenses on a weekly basis. And, indeed, A Wall Street Journal article in 1968 reported that in 1967 in my hometown “there were thirty-five arrests for adultery, eleven for fornication, twenty-seven for lewd and lascivious cohabitation.” Elizabeth H. Pleck, in her book Not Just Roommates: Cohabitation After the Sexual Revolution, says that the local paper, the Sheboygan Press, published with pride the entire WSJ article, and the town took honor in being the cohabitation arrest capital of the United States in the 1970s. (Not Just Roommates can be found on Google books.) The cohabitation law was repealed in 1983, but it was enforced as late as 1978.

          I believe that the fornication law, too, was repealed, and in any event, such laws are unconstitutional under Lawrence. I have read that the Wisconsin adultery law, although now not enforceable, is still on the books as a felony, and probably other states also retain such a law, too. If Lawrence is overruled, those laws can again be enforced. Of course, there will be nothing like full enforcement of the laws against adultery or fornication. Our court and jail systems could not handle the cases even, perhaps especially, in the South where divorce rates are higher than in much of the North.

We can, however, expect that there will be pockets around the country where the laws will sometimes be enforced. Back in the day the Sheboygan police chief said that most of the arrests for sexual offenses resulted from neighbor’s complaints. The arrests, however, also clearly comported with his personal sense of morality. Offended neighbors are still with us as are enraged spouses or ex-spouses, and in some places, they will clamor for arrests and prosecutions. And religious zealotry is certainly with us. After all, while the Bible does not mention abortion, it does condemn adultery and fornication. We can expect that some police chiefs and sheriffs will hear the call from what they think is God (as well as the call of publicity and political ambition), and they will do what they claim is His will.

Posted on by rjonakait

Independent People on an Iceland Journey

          Iceland is that island on my map that is a little to the right of Greenland, a bit further to the left of Norway, and on a northwest diagonal from the Faroe Islands. (Until recently, I was not sure whether Iceland was east or west of Greenland, and I was unaware of the Faroes.) Two facts I heard over and over on my trip to Iceland is that it is located in the North Atlantic and that it is small, both physically and in population.

          Apparently because Americans (I am in this group) cannot readily understand land mass numbers—Iceland comprises 102,775 square kilometers, that is, 39,682 square miles—small countries are often compared to the size of some U.S. state. When I was in Israel, the comparison was to New Jersey, which surely was the foundation for a joke. The analogy I heard for Iceland was Ohio, which comprises 116,096 square kilometers.

          Americans also seem to want the physical size of a place given in driving terms. Iceland’s Route 1, known as the Ring Road, mostly circles the island, and it is 821 miles in length. The Ring Road was finished only in 1974; before that many parts of the country were effectively isolated from each other. It is now paved and in good shape. Considering how hard the winters and springs are supposed to be, I was surprised to see no potholes. Except in some cities where it is wider and for some one-lane bridges and tunnels, it has two lanes, and the speed limit is the equivalent of 55 mph. You can do the arithmetic to figure out how long it would take to drive the whole thing.

          The population of places in my experience is just given as a number without any American comparison. Iceland has about 370,000 inhabitants, but let’s give some U.S. numbers. Ohio has nearly 12 million people, and the greater Columbus area has over 2 million residents. Wyoming has the smallest population of the American states, and it has 576,000 residents (and it still gets two Senators.)

          Just the name Iceland implies a harsh climate, and that topic seems to play a role in every one of the eight or nine books I have read set in or about the country. While Iceland does have prominent glaciers, the climate’s harshness, on the one hand, is overstated. For example, in Reykjavik, which is in the southwest corner of the Island, the average high and low temperatures in January are 35 and 27 degrees Fahrenheit. In Akureyri, the largest town in the north, they are 34 and 22 degrees. Much of the northern tier of the United States is colder. Where I grew up the average temperatures in January are 30 and 15 degrees, and Sheboygan is hardly the coldest place in the continental United States Iceland’s snowfall is also not spectacularly high compared to many places in the United States. Reykjavik averages 20 inches of snow in January, while Buffalo, New York, averages 27 inches. Even so, stories about towns isolated by snows are a common feature of Icelandic books. Snowblind, the first book in an excellent mystery story series by Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Quentin Bates) is an example. I am guessing the isolation caused by snow results partly from the climate’s harshness but also from the sparsely settled landscape. Plowing the 800 miles of the Ring Road must take a bit of time.

          On the other hand, Iceland does not get very warm during the summer with average highs and lows in Reykjavik of 58 and 48 degrees in July. And on the third hand, Iceland, I am assured, feels colder than other places because of regular high winds. Icelanders seldom carry umbrellas because, I was told, the rain comes sideways, not vertically

          Iceland’s geology is another dominant topic. As I have confessed before, I have a block when it comes to learning geology, but I think I am doing better, partly because I went to a good Icelandic museum on volcanoes with outstanding interactive displays.

If I got this right, the distinctive geology has to do with tableware displays. Iceland is at the conjunction of two things I think are called textile dishes, although the one on the European side might be called the Teutonic plate. For some reason I don’t fully grasp, the table is slowly drifting apart, a centimeter or two each year. Perhaps it is because of the frequent earthquakes (100 a year). Or perhaps the earthquakes are caused by the drifting plates. Whatever. It must be for the same reason that the pictures on my wall regularly go out of skew.

You might think that the moving dishes and plates would cause them to fall off the table and smash into pieces, as no doubt—don’t pretend otherwise—has happened in your home. But no, the drifting allows stuff to come up from below, as if it were a dog in the cellar that darts through the opening when the door is opened. Apparently this dog comes up from the center of the earth, which only superheroes, Jules Verne, and trolls (there are many trolls in Iceland) have ever seen. That stuff I think is Magnum Bars, which I learned about on a trip to Turkey. A good treat, but then again, it may not be Magnum Bars since the stuff that’s oozing to the surface because of jiggling plates (perhaps they are spinning on rods like those frantic entertainers on the Ed Sullivan Show) is hot, not just warm, but hot, hot, hot, seriously hot. And when this hot stuff escapes to Iceland’s surface all sorts of things happen—most dramatically and significantly, volcanoes.

Volcanic eruptions are not one in a hundred-year events in Iceland. A volcano erupted without warning on an island just off the “mainland” in 1973. Luckily, the fishing fleet was in the harbor and safely evacuated 5,300 people. Seawater was sprayed onto the advancing lava flow to stop it from destroying the harbor. Another volcano did its thing in 2011, and yet another one erupted in 2014 for 180 days, which spewed large amounts of sulphur dioxide into the air, making it hard for many Icelanders to breathe. In 2021, a volcano near Reykjavik erupted attracting hundreds of thousands who hiked to watch it. In short, these eruptions happen with disturbing regularity.

(to be continued)

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

The Worst of Times? The Indiana Pope, Fluoride, Daniels, and Wilmington

          Does anyone think it is the best of times? Many of my friends seem to think it is the worst of times. They refer to the Big Lie claims of a stolen election, the insurrection of January 6, 2021, trying to prevent the consequences of a valid election, conspiracy theories from pedophilia to the great replacement, to racists in office, and so on. They believe that the internet and social media have made America’s worst tendencies worse and that they will continue to spread misinformation, hate, and divisiveness among us. My pessimism about America may not be as great as my friends’, not, however, because I don’t share their feelings, but because I realize that racial hate and violence, attacks on our elections, and dangerous conspiracy theories have been imbedded in this country from its beginnings. American exceptionalism has always contained a heavy dose of craziness.

          Long before the internet and social media, this country was crawling with controversies. Looking back many of them seem comical. But many weren’t. They were taken seriously. Many harmed individuals and families. Many harmed the country. A few examples. Consider North Manchester, Indiana.

          The 1920s saw an extensive resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. We may think of the Klan today as a group of anti-Black organizations, and racism has always been a dominant ideology of the KKK, but a hundred years ago, the Klan also heavily featured antisemitism and anti-Catholicism. The anti-Catholicism was a component of an anti-immigrant animus. The Klan followed a Great Replacement theory. Native-born whites were being replaced by dark immigrants from Southern Europe who held a foreign, dangerous, and anti-Christian ideology, that is, Roman Catholicism, and of course, the leader of this Devil’s brigade, and therefore, the figure for reviling, was the Pope. The politics of many northern states were heavily influenced by anti-Catholicism, including attempts to ban Catholic parochial schools. Bizarre conspiracy theories were rampant, including one that affected North Manchester, then and now a small town in north central Indiana.

          The 2,700 residents of North Manchester in 1923 saw much Klan activity including a cross burning in February that apparently gave concern only because it was windy that night, and a fire might have spread from the oil-saturated burlap that covered the twenty-foot construction of two-by-four timbers. In April, the local newspaper reported a talk by Reverend Blair to a “large audience,” who explained that the Klan was founded in the South during Reconstruction “when the negroes, controlled by unscrupulous white men, were creating terrorism.” He said that the Klan had been recently reorganized and it was now “composed of American-born Protestant citizens to combat existing evils in the U.S. The Klan never took the law into its own hands, but that it obtained evidence and then turned that information over to the proper authorities.”

          A Klan parade in May clogged the roads, and the North Manchesterites saw 129 hooded people participate. In September, 2,500 people attended a Klan picnic and heard Klan speakers.

          And during these times, a Klan lecturer warned that the arch-villain, the Pope, was coming on the morning train to Chicago the next day. To protect the native-born Protestants who were exceptional defenders of the country, a thousand people met the train and confronted the one person who disembarked. That man spent an uncomfortable half-hour and finally convinced the concerned citizens that he was not the Pope in disguise but only a corset salesman. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side the Klan acolytes put him on the next train out of town. (See Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan by David Mark Chalmers.) No one was hurt although one corset salesman had to have been terrified and could not do his job, but this craziness was a mere sliver of what affected the country.

          A different conspiracy theory affected my hometown while I was growing up. In the 1940s, scientists learned that fluoride could help prevent tooth decay. Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has not been a national leader in many things, but according to the Sheboygan Water Utility Company, in 1946 it became the first water company in Wisconsin and the third in the country to fluoridate its water supply. I drank that water from infancy and do have good teeth. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, far right politicians maintained that fluoridation was a plot to impose a communist regime in this country by sapping the brainpower and strength of a generation of kids. I would explain the logic behind this movement, but I was mystified by it then, and I still am. Even as a pre-teen, I thought that if the communists sought to take over this country by targeting Sheboygan, then those Bolsheviks were a long way away from dominating the world. But the spread of this paranoia had significant success as referendums around the country defeated fluoridated water, and it was not until the 1990s that most of the country had the benefits that it brings.

          We tend to forget now how often the communist label was spread to oppose progress. Rachel Carson writing about imminent ecological damage was a tool of the communists. Martin Luther King, Jr., if not an actual communist, was a dupe of them. The National Council of Churches had communistic tendencies. Medicare is communism. Teachers teaching anything that a red-blooded American might object to was a communist. Rock ‘n roll fostered communism. And so on. The right wing in the era of McCarthyism and beyond trotted out fears of a giant communist conspiracy again and again with as much basis as the Big Lie today, and many individuals and this country suffered because of it. Conservatives then and now could not tell the difference between radicalism to be feared and an idea.

(concluded May 27)

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

The White Christmas

A white Christmas for me growing up was not simply that snow had blanketed the ground by Christmas, but that it actually snowed on Christmas. By either definition, I don’t remember many white Christmases. It was often bleak and cold on December 25th in our part of Wisconsin, but at least in my memory the snow, or at least the snow that did not melt away, came later in the season. And since winters did not depart Wisconsin easily, I saw more Easters with snow on the ground than Christmases. In the shadows behind the garage that the sun never reached, there could still be pockets of snow in May.

But there was one Christmas Eve…

Christmas day was largely for playing with new presents and ended with a boring family get-together at Aunt Hazel’s house. I remember little about it other than that the sister and Cousin Margaret lit into the olives at the first opportunity. Instead, as it is for many Germanic and Germanic-descended people, our main focus for the Christmas celebration was not Christmas Day but on Christmas Eve.

By Christmas Eve, the tree would have been up for a week or so. The buying and mounting of the tree were always a difficult process. Now all the Christmas trees I see for sale seem to be nearly perfect—symmetrical with needle-laden branches everywhere and a straight trunk. Not so back then. Finding an acceptable one without too many flaws was always a difficult and time-consuming task, and when it was brought home, much discussion would ensue about which portion of the tree should face the wall to hide the most defects and whether the tree stood as perpendicular to the floor as the often-wavering trunk allowed. Rarely did the family agree on the accepted solution. But the tree was up and decorated well before Christmas Eve.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve. Nothing was placed under the tree (except for a toy train and a miniature village) before then. I remember that we (I was the youngest of three) were sent to our rooms for a bit. Then there was a “Ho! Ho! Ho!”– now I wonder if that could have been the father—followed by a cry, “Santa’s been here!” One year the family ran to the kitchen window overlooking our backyard. Pointing to a deep, starry sky, one of the parents shouted, “There he goes!” My sister, the eldest, said, “I see him.” (Was this the only time she lied to me?) I looked and looked, but I saw no sleigh, no reindeer, no Santa. I had missed him yet again.

Before the presents were opened, however, we went to a Christmas Eve service at the church. This churchgoing was highly unusual because both parents attended. As far as I can remember, this was the only time of the year my father went, and my mother, at most, went only a few other times a year. (My father drove us kids to Sunday school and then picked us up afterwards. In between he went somewhere else.)

And then one year it happened. We walked into church on this crisp winter night. Even though I can’t sing one note on tune, I have always liked Christmas carols, and, unlike on many Sundays, I enjoyed this service. The last carol was “Silent Night,” then my favorite, and it always gave me a peaceful feeling. We left the church, and there it was: A blanket of snow. During the hour of the service, an inch or two had fallen, and the church steps, the sidewalk, the lawns, the road were all white. The snow was continuing, but it was not so much falling as floating. It was the kind of snow that compelled you to catch some on your tongue. The snow almost hung in front of the streetlamps causing a light that seemed otherworldly. Every pine tree looked like a Christmas tree. It was a white Christmas the way I had imagined a white Christmas should be. It seemed the correctly beautiful and peaceful way to welcome the baby Jesus into the world.

Merry Christmas!

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

 The pop-up ad asked, “What happens when you take a testosterone supplement?” The answer according to the ad: a young blonde appears. She has melon-sized breasts and hard nipples and is clothed in a dress so tight that it gives a lasting impression of the melon-sized breasts and hard nipples.

Don Everly died recently. His younger brother Phil died even earlier, seven years ago. Many, including me, loved much of their music, but I am willing to bet that I am one of the few who bought the Everly Brothers album “Both Sides of an Evening” because it had their version of “Mention My Name in Sheboygan.”

There is little to admire in China’s criminal justice system. On the other hand, I recently read that a mainland Chinese person was convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” If this crime were not used in China to prosecute journalists and if it could be confined to politicians and some of my neighbors, I might like it.

America has become increasingly “divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” Stephen Colbert.

Each tennis player had won a point. The umpire intoned the score: “Fifteen all.” Would it be more grammatically correct or more accurate if she had said, “Fifteen both”?

A columnist excoriated Biden for imposing the vaccine mandates because as a candidate he said that would not require the injections. I thought of the words of Bernard Berenson: “Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.”

A woman at a protest against covid vaccine mandates was wearing a tee shirt reading “My Body My Choice.” I wondered, but doubted, that the woman was also pro-choice because I have seen similar tee shirts at rallies promoting abortion rights.

The Senator said that our withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan was “clearly and fatally flawed.” I wondered what he meant. A fatal flaw, I thought, means that such-and-such an event cannot happen because of the inherent flaw. And yet, the withdrawal occurred. Perhaps he meant that the withdrawal was clearly and fundamentally flawed.

It seemed odd that he was putting together a jigsaw puzzle on a picnic table in a neighborhood park. As I got closer, I saw that the pieces were too small for a puzzle and thought he was doing some sort of work with beads, but there was also an Exacto knife and a pair of scissors. I passed him and then looked over his shoulder. Intent on his project, he did not notice me, but I asked, “Is that leather?” He looked up and said that he was cutting up Air Jordans. I could now see that he had almost finished creating a portrait of Michael Jordan from intricately-cut pieces of the man’s shoes. He told me that the picture would also have a basketball, which he was going to create by cutting up pieces of a real basketball. I asked if he sold his art, and if so, where. He said that he did sell his creations and was going to do so on an app that was not yet functioning. I asked if he was often in this park. He said, gesturing at the building to the north, “Yes. My son goes to school there.”  I looked again at the work in progress and said, “That’s cool,” but embarrassed myself a bit by adding, “man.” He, however, just smiled, looking pleased when I said that I would see him again.

Posted on by rjonakait

Glory Days

          She emailed a picture of me and a group of other guys on our last day at Washington Grade School. If Carol had not told me the names of those standing casually in front of a wall, I am not sure that I would have recognized any, even me, although we had all been classmates and would be for four more years in high school.

          I replied to Carol, and we struck up a correspondence. Each time she would attach a picture with me in it and would ask about my memories of some event—the safety patrol picnic, for example—which I hardly remembered at all. Recently she said that she had only one more picture to send, although she had Sheboygan Press clippings that mentioned me. She felt certain that I already had these. I assumed that her assumption was wrong. I don’t dwell much on those “Glory Days.” After all I did not have an outstanding high school speedball, though I did hit a walk-off home run in my first Little League game. But…but…but then I vaguely remembered that I had a file in a rarely-opened drawer labeled “High School.” I dumped its contents onto my desk and a flotilla of faded newspaper clippings floated across it. This unexpected volume of paper was misleading. From handwritten notes I realized that aunts and friends and even the local bank had sometimes sent my parents an article they had clipped out of the evening paper if it mentioned me, so my high school file had many duplicates.

          On the other hand, the Press published articles about high school students that a paper in a larger town (Sheboygan had a population of about 45,000) no doubt would not have, and thus the clippings did contain a fair number of separate stories. Even though I played high school sports, there were no mentions of my athletic accomplishments. There were good reasons for that. My four-point basketball average did not draw much attention. The athletic glory days ended in grade school.

I remembered many of the events chronicled in the clippings, but there was one that surprised me. I did not remember winning the Constitution Contest sponsored by Sheboygan Elks Lodge 299, although I remembered placing third in the state constitution contest sponsored by the Elks. The story said I had won $150. How could I forget such a thing?! That was a significant amount of money to me, and my parents, back then—the equivalent of about $1,300 today. By comparison, I had my first forty-hour-a-week job that summer. I was paid the minimum wage, which was $1.25 an hour. Work a day and get paid ten bucks. Work three weeks and get $150 — the same amount I got for taking a two- or three-hour test. (That $1.25 an hour minimum wage translates to about $11.10 an hour today, a paltry amount but still more than the national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.) I don’t have the vaguest notion of what I did with my $150 largesse.

          What I found most interesting was not reading about me or my classmates, but the stories on the back or surrounding the clippings. They revealed that I did not know as many things about Sheboygan as I thought I did. Growing up, I thought of the area as safe, but there were more hazardous happenings than I was aware of. For example, a driver struck and killed a 500-pound black calf on County Trunk S. “He said that two calves suddenly ran across the road in front of his car and he was unable to avoid striking one of them.” The story did not report any damage to the driver or damage to the vehicle.

Cooking oil on a residential stove ignited and the fire department was called. “The blaze was extinguished by the time firemen arrived, but they used fans to ventilate the home.”

A truck ran into a road barricade, and the driver was charged, but the clipping cut off the rest of the story, so I did not find out with what.

A man not feeling well left his work at a furniture manufacturer. He felt worse as he was headed to the hospital and flagged down a patrol car “to take him the rest of the way. He apparently suffered a slight heart attack.”

A 9-year-old “suffered a bump to the back of the head and bruises to the left arm in a fall from his bicycle.”

A warning went out about a poisonous bean used in necklaces, rosaries, and as dolls’ eyes.

          The town had crime unknown to me. Six weeks after a night of vandalism that included dragging a swing set and garbage cans into the street and opening car doors, twenty boys and girls were apprehended and referred to the juvenile authorities. A Mr. James Prigge discovered that windshield wipers, the radio aerial, horn ring, steering wheel, gas pedal and floorboards were ripped out, a tire was flattened, and the cigar-lighter was missing from his seven-year-old car that had been parked in his company’s parking lot. (A disgruntled employee? General labor trouble? Or just vandalism? I did not have a follow-up story.) An owner of a plumbing supply company reported that in the last two days chrome pipes were stolen from a storage area. “He valued the missing supplies at $4.20.”

“Vickie Fintelmann reported her J.C. Higgins bicycle, valued at $15, stolen from the Kuehne Court playground.” This surprised me. I went to that playground on my bike almost every day during the summer. We left the bikes unattended, and there was no thought in those days of locking them. I had never heard of one being stolen. But perhaps Vickie’s bike was tempting because it was a J.C. Higgins. Almost everyone, both boys and girls, rode a single speed bicycle with wide tires, often with a basket on the front. Then a few people showed up at the bike racks with the fancy “English-style” bicycles with narrow tires and three gears, and I think the J.C. Higgins fell into that category. My memory is that my correspondent Carol, on whom I always had a crush, was the first I knew to have such a bike although hers may have been a Raleigh.

(Continued May 28)

Posted on by rjonakait

Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too

I have avowed or suggested or implied that a police officer was a liar, had been incompetent, had been less than bright, had used excessive force, had been brutal. I have been personally wary and fearful when I have seen a cop. But I respect the police and what they do.

I didn’t have any contact with the police in the small town where I grew up until I was halfway through high school. Then one day I was asked to go the police station after school where I was questioned by detectives. The crime being investigated had occurred in my girlfriend’s neighborhood. I had dropped Wendy off the previous night. (Of course, I had walked her to the door; I was a young gentleman.) I had been driving my father’s two-toned Oldsmobile, and apparently a neighbor thought that the car had been involved in some sort of incident on the previous night. I seldom drove that or any other car, and although the police kept me for an hour, I was eventually dismissed. Perhaps it was my teenage arrogance (which did not necessarily end with my teenage years), but I was never concerned or scared or apprehensive. I was, after all, innocent. I thought it mostly amusing.

My other contact with a police officer in high school was more informal. On summer mornings I umpired younger kids’ baseball games that were held at what was once a minor league stadium. The program was supervised by a police officer, who, after his midnight-to-eight shift, came to the ballpark. He seemed like a nice guy, but I was shy around adults and learned little about him or his work. I regret my inability to talk more with him. I wonder now what it was like to patrol my hometown and the stories he might have shared. I did not think then about who his friends were or about his family. The kids I hung out with came from a wide economic swath of the town. My friends’ parents worked in factories, were tool and die makers, cabinetmakers, barbers, factory owners, lawyers, bankers, tavern owners, manufacturers’ representatives, physical education teachers, insurance salesmen, clergy, and jewelers. But I knew no one whose parent was a police officer. Whatever world this police officer and his colleagues inhabited, it was completely separate from my world.

I had no contact with the police at my isolated university either. I don’t remember ever seeing an officer on the campus. The police certainly did not seek to enforce the drinking laws. As long as we were on college property, we could have our beer and scotch. This only meant finding a senior to buy the goods and carry it across the street from the liquor store onto the campus. (Done in those genteel days without a fee or surcharge other than one beer for the senior.) There were drinking rules on the campus; underage students were not to drink openly on campus, but it was ok in rooms and certain outdoor places. This restriction was loosely enforced by university security personnel called proctors, and violations were usually met with a mere reprimand. Something more severe, such as breaking a bottle or window, might cause a report to a dean. Never once did it occur to us that such behavior could cause an arrest and trip to the precinct headquarters or to court—something I only thought about a decade later when, working as a public defender, I realized that comparable street corner actions in New York often brought out the handcuffs.

In my college years, I did have one contact with the police. I was sharing driving duties with classmates as we drove from New Jersey to Chicago, and I was stopped by an unmarked car for speeding (which I was) on the turnpike in the middle of Pennsylvania. I was asked to get into the cop car and was driven to a Justice of the Peace where I paid a fine while my college colleagues waited for my return. (I was a little miffed that they did not offer to pick up part of the fine since all of us drove over the speed limit.) I was polite and mostly quiet with the officer. As we got to the court, he said, “I could have charged you for going more than fifteen miles an hour over the limit, and I would have, if you were a wiseass, but you haven’t been.” I thanked him and said, “I was being careful to keep it at thirteen or fourteen miles too fast. I only went above fifteen because I saw you behind me and sped up to get in front of some cars in the right lane to pull over and let you get by me.” He smiled a bit. What I most remember about the drive from the turnpike to pay the fine was that this was my first sight of Appalachia and that many of the houses’ sagging porches looked as though they were being held up by a wash line strung between the corner posts.

Primarily, however, as I left college, I had given little consideration to the police, who they were, where they came from, how they learned their job, or the work they did. I, like almost anyone of my generation, had seen the televised police brutality with civil rights demonstrators, but that was in the South. I assumed that the South was a world apart.

I chose to go to law school in Chicago over what some assumed were more prestigious law schools elsewhere.  After growing up in a little Wisconsin town and going to college in a small, isolated New Jersey village, I wanted to live in a city. The University of Chicago certainly provided me with a new atmosphere. It was a beautiful campus in a beautiful neighborhood, but that neighborhood was small and bordered “ghettoes,” which meant black neighborhoods. We were told that these were not safe for university students, which meant young white people. This was the first time that I lived in a community where people were concerned about crime and their personal safety. These concerns, however, did not cause me to reflect much on the police. They did not seem to me to be my protector; they couldn’t really protect me if I were to become a victim. This was confirmed the first time I was mugged.

I lived in a terrible one-room, one-window apartment with a decrepit bed that came out of the wall. There was no air conditioning and the window faced a brick wall three feet away. During that first hot summer, the apartment was unbearable. I got up one night from my sweat-soaked mattress and decided to make an after midnight walk in hopes of catching a breeze. Instead, I was confronted by teenagers with knives who demanded money. They got it, but they agreed that I could keep my wallet when I said that I didn’t want to have to replace my papers. One said he wanted my watch. I said that a friend had only given it to me a week ago (true) and I would not give it up. The leader smilingly nodded to me, and they ran away without it.

It never occurred to me that a police officer should have or could have prevented this incident. The mugging took just a few moments, and it would have been the barest coincidence if a cop had been nearby when it happened. That was driven home twenty years later when I was robbed at knifepoint again, this time on the Brooklyn block where I live. I was walking from the subway to my home after work on a winter evening when a man walked past me, turned, and blocked my path. He made sure I saw the knife in his right hand and quietly, but menacingly, demanded my money. He got it, but again I retained the wallet. This only took a few moments. Other people were out on the block. I could see my next-door neighbor over the mugger’s shoulder. She yelled hello. She could not see the knife held by the man I was apparently chatting with. I merely nodded in response, and my robber sprinted off after getting my twenty dollars.

(continued Sept. 30)

Posted on by rjonakait

A Sausage Made It Famous

          Sheboygan is famous for one thing, at least in its eyes. No, it’s not me even though I was born and raised there.

          Sheboygan, Wisconsin, sits on the shores of Lake Michigan halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, about fifty miles from each. Growing up this location was a boon. We could get television stations from both places, but this was the days of over-the-air and required an antenna. The father installed a rotor that could shift the antenna’s direction south towards Milwaukee or north towards Green Bay. Most often, this did not matter much because each city had the three networks showing the same shows, and while Milwaukee had an independent station, the networks were where it was at.

Occasionally, the rotor would malfunction, and the father would get out a long ladder and climb onto the roof to make adjustments. This being snow country, the roof was steeply pitched. I should have been concerned that this job held some danger, but I had a child’s faith in his father. The repairs, however, were a three-person job. With him on the roof, one of us watched the TV and shouted when the rotor had the antenna in exactly the right position to get Milwaukee. Another of us would be outside the window and relayed the message to the roof man. Then the inside person would move the rotor through some sort of device towards Green Bay, and the same shouting ensued.

          This rotor business was essential for one very, very important reason—the Green Bay Packers. I can hardly overstate the obsession with the Lombardi-era team of my youth, although a similar obsession for each era of Packers has continued. Back then, Green Bay played half its home games in Green Bay and half in Milwaukee. The NFL then had a blackout policy that prevented hometown television stations from broadcasting games for a team’s home games. However, Green Bay was outside the blackout zone when the Packers played in Milwaukee, and the CBS station could carry Ray Scott announcing the game, and the Milwaukee station carried it when the game was in Green Bay. With that blessed rotor we could get all the games in the comfort of our home. (The Packers have played many famous games. Among them is the Ice Bowl when the Packers met the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL championship on the last day of 1967. On that morning, the father got a call from an acquaintance and was asked whether he wanted to go. Showing wisdom I did not always give him credit for, he declined and said that we would watch the game from the comfort of home. It was not that we were not experienced with cold. The average high for three winter months in Sheboygan was in the mid-twenties with the average low fifteen degrees colder. Whenever there was a cold snap, we would wake up to below-zero days, and I can regale you, as I have the NBP (nonbinary progeny) and the spouse many times, about how I walked to school in that cold, although I lied if I ever said that I had to do it without shoes. We knew cold, but we also had an understanding of cold, and December 31, 1967, was extraordinary. The temperature at kickoff was minus fifteen, but, of course, there was a wind, which plunged the wind chills into the minus forty ranges. I can go on about that game, but you can read about in the pioneering book by Jerry Kramer, who made the key block, and Dick Schaap, Instant Reply, but I don’t think that book contains this nugget. In those long-ago days, spectators could carry beer into the stadium. I was told that those who did found their six-packs frozen before the first quarter ended. For Wisconsites, that brought on real suffering. But I digress. Let me move onto my next digression.)

          For me, however, the defining aspect of Sheboygan was not that it was a half-way point between two other places but that it was on Lake Michigan. Those who consider a place like Wisconsin flyover country do not understand the beauty, power, and importance of the Great Lakes (or the Mississippi River.) I spent many hours on the shore and piers of Lake Michigan. (My bedroom has a series of pictures of the Sheboygan lighthouse.) My childhood would have been much different without Lake Michigan (and the myriad inland lakes, Elkhart Lake, Crystal Lake, Little Crystal Lake, Random Lake, and many others within a half-hour of the hometown.) Whenever I returned after leaving Sheboygan, I would first head to Lake Michigan and drive up the lakeshore starting at the Armory where the Sheboygan Redskins played in the first year of the National Basketball Association (you can look it up) past the beach and up the hill to Vollrath Bowl before heading home. (There is a lot of good literature about the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, marshes, and swamps. I don’t know any about the Great Lakes. Give me suggestions if you know some.)

(continued June 3.)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

I thought that Ross Perot, who recently died and is now largely forgotten, looked like Howdy Doody, but Howdy had a more engaging more personality. And sometimes I lie awake at night listening for that “giant sucking sound.”

If the 2016 election brought increased sales for Brave New World and 1984, will the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein do the same for the marvelous and deeply disturbing Lolita? Or for The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman that chronicles the abduction of a young girl, an episode that mirrors and may have influenced Nabokov’s book?

I am Donald J. Trump.

I never admit a slump.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,

Of my brain, thou shalt not speak.

The handyman had come to look at a small project. I was wearing an anti-Trump shirt. He said that he liked it. I replied that I was careful where I wore it. He said that I should be because people got so angry nowadays. I realized that he had not absorbed all the writing on the shirt when he said that Trump had been sent from God. He had only limited times to do the job this week because of church obligations and volunteer work at a Christian radio station. He was an evangelical. And he was black.

I don’t understand many things. For example, I don’t understand many Americans’ fascination with British royalty.

A reason that I am not a conservative: I do not believe that wealth equates with moral worth.

My ears perked up when I heard that the podcast Planet Money was reporting from where I grew up, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The story focused on how employees in a time of strong employment were gaining power. To illustrate its point, it discussed Kohler Company, which the podcast said was in Sheboygan, and interviewed one of its workers. I wanted to correct the report. As a native of Sheboygan, I never would have said that Kohler is in Sheboygan. It’s in the village of Kohler, which is in Sheboygan County, but not Sheboygan. Sheboygan and Kohler are separate places. The studio reporter asked the man in the field where the Kohler employee might go if the workers’ demands were not met by the company. He replied, “They could go to Sargento Cheese or Johnsonville Brats.” The studio guy sounded amazed, asking, “They are all in Sheboygan?” This Sheboygan native rebelled at the affirmative reply. Sargento is in Plymouth and Johnsonville Brats is in, hold your hat, Johnsonville. Both near Sheboygan, but not in Sheboygan. But then the field reporter said with a hint of smile in his voice something I had not known from my years there, “Sheboygan is a feast for the senses.” Even so, I am not planning a move back.