West by Midwest: they smoke weed out there!

Last week, sipping a gin and tonic at the Denver airport at the end of my 2^nd visit in a year, I found myself pondering other recent trips out west, Seattle and Portland included and considering the cultural differences between here and the Midwest.

Denver's capital building from my son Jack's apartment building.

To start with, yes, it’s true, just about anywhere you go in Denver the earthy, sweet aroma of marijuana greets you. Standing in line at the Great American Beer Fest I smelled weed. Sitting in my son’s kitchen in Capital Hill the smell rolled in the window regularly. Standing outside my other son, Sean’s place a block away, weed fumes waft down the street and up the stairwell. It followed me everywhere I went.

I started to think Willie Nelson was stalking me.

But the unique in these northwestern places goes beyond being on the cutting edge of legalized pot. There’s an easy-going “chill” to these cities that make them comfy places. Crowds at concerts and festivals strike me as more gracious and tolerant. Folks on the street are relaxed and smiling. They’ve got a refreshing “can-do” and “live and let live” way about them.

We like to think that technology is collapsing the borders between us, and I think it clearly is.

On a recent episode of Bill Maher’s show, a guest made a joke about the south being backward and hostile to Bill’s aggressive liberal politics. Maher was quick to disagree, noting that every urban area he performs in across the America is as plugged in and worldly as any other, with universities, ethnic restaurants, food co-ops, a broad base of religious faiths and strong appreciation for the arts.

My son Sean during our hiking trip last week.

My own little corner of Indiana has its Thai restaurants, brewery tasting rooms, organic food producers, Trader Joe's, immigrants, vegans and hipsters. About any musical artist you want to see performs here. There's opera, orchestra and professional soccer. I’ve seen just as many hipsters in Indy’s Fountain Square as I found in any other vibrant inner city neighborhood in Portland, Seattle, or Denver. And Indy has been winning recognition lately as an increasingly bike friendly town.

But there are differences.

Mid-westerners in general, and Hoosiers in particular, have what I impatiently call a “can’t-do spirit.” Propose a new idea and somebody’s quick to list all the reasons why it won’t work.

It’s a suffocating cultural reflex.

It’s very Midwestern and so very Hoosier. Got a new idea? “Lemme tell you why it won’t work.” You’ll hear Garrison Keillor describe the characters in the fictitious Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon that way. Hoosier politicians specialize in it.

Former Indiana University economist Morton Marcus once said, “If the Garden of Eden had been placed on the banks of the Wabash, we’d still be waiting for original sin.” Hoosiers just don’t want to be first. We’ve got our rut matted down just the way we like it. I’m proud of being a Hoosier, but this nay-sayer tendency make me absolutely crazy

Folks in northwestern cities seem to have little fear of being first. Little fear of looking at the world with fresh eyes.

They like the outdoors, but instead of just saying so like most folks do here, they actually go out and use it. Hoosiers will say they long for the great outdoors of the west. I’ll ask, “Do you ever drive an hour to southern Indiana and hike in the state and national forests? Do they ever go caving down there? Ever throw a kayack in our beautiful local river?” I often get blank stares in response.

Northwesterners love live music, and instead of simply buying their annual tickets to Jimmy Buffet, Dave Matthews and Zack Brown Band, they actually go out to hear live music on a regular basis –small acts in small venues are just fine. That seeds a local musician culture. If you don't support live music at the grassroots, you don't get a thriving local musician culture. Northwesterners seem more interested in social justice, concerned to the point of taking action over whether those with less are cared for. They celebrate the odd, the weird, the unusual, rather than recoiling from it. These are the places that loved Hoosier writer Kurt Vonnegut while folks in Indiana scratched their heads at his unique, sometime controversial style. Mass transit makes perfect sense to those in the urban west. That’s why it’s so easy to move around their cities. Here, Indy has been wringing its hands for a couple decades about light rail. We just can’t make ourselves pull the trigger. While we grumble about why it won’t work, northwestern cities go ahead and build it.

The view hiking near Estes last week.

True, those cities have their own, over the top weirdness. There’s the Portland movements to sorta legalize homelessness, “Ya know, why can’t these folks sleep outside in public places if they want to? Isn’t it their right?” I’m thinking, “My God! Shouldn’t you at least start by trying to find them a home?” And the near flat-earth insistence that Portland’s water not be fluoridated. And my Seattle friends joke, "People out here get pissed if you're smoking a cigarette in public, but not if you're smoking week."

These northwestern places are prone to such first world luxuries. Folks in third world countries wouldn’t understand. You first have to be spoiled before you can start fearing your luxuries with “fresh eyes.”

But these western places are mostly different in admirable ways.

And along with their “can-do” spirit, they have a “live and let live spirit.” That’s why legalized marijuana is taking hold out west along with gay marriage and doctor assisted suicide.

So I sit in the Denver airport preparing to head home to the Hoosier state where politicians say the want to get government off our backs but at the same time are so damn eager to dictate the terms of our private lives. And progressive change? I won't be expecting that anytime soon. My local and state leaders are likely ready with a list of reasons why change won’t work.

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The Empty Nester

July 30, 2014

When I was first restoring this house it was full of small kids and life was a whirlwind.

I was a school teacher by day, sold real estate evenings and weekends, was president of a local not-for-profit, had a weekly column in the local paper, was assistant coach of one of the kid’s basketball teams, and was editing and trying to publish a book.

And, yeah, I was restoring this house and was father to small children. Children with soccer, basketball and baseball games, with Cub Scout  & Brownie meetings and science projects and papers they forgot to start writing until the night before they were due.

Each morning at 6:00 I was shot out of a cannon and I ran as fast as I could all day until I dove back into bed. In the morning, the alarm clock lit the cannon fuse again.

During this time, my father, who wasn’t very good at commiserating or sharing emotionally expressive thoughts said, “You remind me of myself when I was your age. I had every unpaid job in town.” Unfortunately I have inherited my father’s habit of offering solace that also sounds like an insult.

My older workaholic sister, Jama shared with me something our dad told her, “We make our own hell. Nobody does it to us.” Our dad told her that.

Once during those years my sister Cindy and her husband Jeff visited from Florida. We were up late – my ex-wife and Cindy on the patio talking while Jeff and I played endless games of H.O.R.S.E and drank beer in the driveway. A child came out in their sleeper suit, awoken by the relentless thump of the basketball. Jeff, who also wasn’t very good at sharing emotionally expressive thoughts, paused mid shot, looked past the ball toward the house and yard, wife and child and said, “You’re a lucky man. You’ve made a really good life.”

Yes I did. And I still do. I’m a very fortunate person.

Though I long-ago freed myself of that manic work schedule, this year I’ve found myself back at a workaholic work day at the very time the children are grown and gone. It should be easier. But even that complaint is a fortunate man’s observation: I’m making good money and publishing a book.

Never the less, I’m exhausted, it is Wednesday and I need a nap.

It is over three years now since I first packed my bags and left this house, 18 months since I kept the house in the divorce, a year since all the boys left in a single autumn and their sister went off to college and nine months since a single soul-numbing weekend in which my brother-in-law, Jeff took his own life on a Friday night and my father died on Sunday. This year has been the busiest of my twenty years of real estate. I have worked insane hours. The relaunch of a book I wrote will take place this coming weekend. In a couple days my house will fill with guests and I will be the center of attention and responsibility.

Lunch at the coffee shop with Peggy and Kelli is done and I desperately need that nap. I drive home and climb the stairs.

Though it’s the middle of the day, I make my rounds. I walk the L-shaped hall and look into each bedroom. I started this when my kids were babies, checking to make sure they were breathing. Then, as they grew I continued my rounds each night before bed to make sure they were asleep or just to watch them a-snooze and think about the age they were and what that meant at the moment. But now each bed is empty. I’ve grown used to this. I’ve cleaned them and prepared them for my weekend guests. The kids are all gone and I am here in the house alone.

Walking to my bedroom I have the faint sense of being left behind, as if everyone else went somewhere and I was the last one left in the world we all once shared together. They, and their mother, all gone. But there’s no real emotional content behind that thought. It’s just a thought. I chose this as my way forward and I’m at peace with it. The kids left because they grew up and started their own lives. All is as it should be.

The sun is pouring through the south-facing windows. I lay down and Gracie curls in behind my knees, purring. I quickly fall into a deep sleep.

An hour later I struggle to wake from a heavy, drug-like sleep. An unseasonably cool July breeze billows the shades out from the window sashes. I’m aware of the sound of a girl giggling and boyish hearty laughter coming over the porch roof and through my bedroom window. I know those voices! It’s the ghosts of my children playing in the side yard. They are running from the sidewalk to the garage, laughing as they go, the joyous sound recedes from my bedroom, echoes hard and bright through the stair landing window, and comes again, this time muffled, from Cal’s back bedroom window down the hall. I think I smell food. Pot pies in the oven downstairs? We’ll eat dinner around the kitchen table soon!

No. That’s wrong. It’s not the sound of my children’s ghosts. It’s their echoes ­– echoes from ten or fifteen years ago that got stuck in the eves of the roof and the foundation vents. The cool breeze has blown them free to be heard again.

But no. Wait! It’s not that at all. It’s the neighbor children playing in the side yard. That’s what it is. Playing in the same place where my children played. Playing the same sorts of games.

As I work my way through this from deep sleep to full waking, I am not sad. I have few regrets. Cal is in Japan. Jack and Sean are in Denver. Sally is visiting my sister, Jama in LA. Their mother lives across town with another man and I am here in our old place. I share this room with another woman. It is all as it should be. We are all in our own good places, places we chose, and on good terms with one other.

This summer, it seems we have all arrived where we should be.

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Athletic Exceptionalism

In the past couple weeks we barely digested the brutality of the Ray Rice video before Adrian Peterson’s story filled the airwaves. And by week’s end Florida State’s Heisman-winning quarterback Jameis Winston was revealed as perhaps the biggest jackass in modern sports after a string of incidents – part comic, part cruel, part criminal.

NFL star Ray Rice was caught on tape slugging his fiancé in the face (who went on to marry him), fellow NFL star Adrian Peterson was charged with child abuse after “spanking” his 4-year-old son, and Winston, who was accused of sexual assault last year and cited this past April for stealing crab legs from a grocery store, was last week documented standing on a table on Florida State’s campus shouting vulgar obscenities at female students.

There are two ways to be outraged about these cumulative offenses – offences that add to an already long list of offences from top-shelf athletes. The first is the abuse of women and children by individual perpetrators. But the actions of the organizations charged with policing the behavior of these individuals bothers me even more.

When individuals fail us in a moment of anger or passion or vulgar stupidity, that’s one thing. When organizations that have supposedly consulted in reasoned calm and still resolved to fail us for the sake of protecting financial interests or avoiding organizational embarrassment, that’s another matter.

The child abuse charges against NFL running back, Adrian Peterson exposed the dividing forces that make it hard for organizations to take action – those defending the status quo, and the abusers. Retired NBA star Charles Barkley defended Peterson citing cultural and regional norms, saying that African Americans from the south simply spank their kids more. “Whipping – we do that all the time,” Barkley said.

When Barkley comments on social issues, he’s often like Dick Cheney commenting on national defense – they both specialize in being wrong.

When Peterson tore a branch off a tree and “spanked” his 4-year-old son, it broke the skin and injured the child’s scrotum. The debate here isn’t about spanking. It’s about child abuse.

I spanked my children, but not as a regular matter of course. Why teach children that violence is the go-to answer for a problem? Instead, I spanked them when their behavior was out of control or they’d endangered their own lives – perhaps run into the street. There would be time later for teaching moments, but at those instances I needed to dramatically get their attention in a flash. So I’m not against spanking. But if the palm of your hand on the back of a child's jeans isn’t enough, and you’re breaking branches off of trees for a weapon, and more importantly, if your child needs medical attention as a result of a spanking, then you didn’t “spank” your child, you abused them.

Debate over!

There are a lot of people who were raised in a lot of circumstances that gave them ideas about personal conduct that land them in jail. That’s not a reason not to put them in jail.

And our reactions are more than a little convoluted and contradictory.  We’re demanding legal action against guys who used violence or aggression in moments of need or anger – guys we love for the violence they use to win games for our entertainment.

But the bottom line: the NFL and NCAA have a problem on their hands and I believe it’s a problem with the athletic culture in this country. According to USA Today, since 2000 there have been 713 instances of NFL players having run-ins with the law that were more serious than minor traffic violations. For an elite, pampered class of individuals marketed as role models to kids and pitchmen in public service ads, that’s not such a great record.

We have to be a little careful in tarring all athletes over the actions of a few. I’m routinely dismayed by the media’s willingness to hold up examples of the extreme and sell it as the norm. The media sell violence, sex, and drama in much the same way Hollywood does. But the stories of top-tier athletes out of control are coming with such frequency it’s clearly more than just a few bad apples. Much as the Catholic Church had to accept that there was a systemic problem with child abuse among priests, the NFL and the NCAA need to accept they have a systemic problem with athletic exceptionalism. And they’ll have to face it and deal with it firmly and honestly, or a chunk of the public will turn their backs on these institutions, starting with the women they’ve been marketing to aggressively in recent years.

In the world of international politics, we speak of “American Exceptionalism,” the idea that America is so big and so strong and speaks with such moral authority that the rules restricting the behavior of other nations don’t apply to us. I think the same notion follows our premier athletes. They’re so big, so strong, so talented, and carry on their shoulders the hopes and dreams of so many fans, they are exceptional – the rules of social decency and criminal justice apparently don’t entirely apply to them.

If you’re like me, you routinely saw evidence of this athletic exceptionalism in high school and college – athletes given the best equipment and the most attention, parents who came for game after game and shouted with passion – but never came to the science fair, the spelling bee or parent/teacher conferences. I routinely saw athletes behave badly and pay no price, or saw higher ups cover for them. As a former teacher who had to grade athletes, I can't count the times I heard parents or coaches plead, "C'mon, he's worked so hard. Don't let one little mistake ruin everything this young man worked so hard for." In other words, don't give him the F he earned, give him a passing grade . . . so he can play ball Friday night.

Our actions show time and again what we value. The gravity that holds the rest of us to the earth does not weigh so much upon premier athletes. And I’m just cynical enough to imagine that if Ray Rice could be given no more than sensitivity training even though police had a video of him slugging his wife in the face, it’s likely the USA Today data hides the true number of incidents of abuse and misbehavior – the times an NFL player was allowed to walk without a report after telling a police officer, “Maybe you don’t know who I am . . .”

Think we don’t give preferential treatment to athletes? Next time you’re buying food or drink in the greater Indianapolis area, consider that our millionaire professional gladiators, the Colts, play in a stadium funded by taxes you’re paying on your beer, your latte, your dinner. And Jim Irsay, the owner of that team was caught last May intoxicated behind the wheel of a car filled with illegal pills and $29,000 in cash. For all my social media friends beating the drum for welfare recipients to be tested for drugs before they get their check - why don't we test Irsay and the Colts players? They take tax-payer money as certainly as any welfare recipient? 

Why don't we? Because they're "exceptional." The poor people who can't afford to attend the professional games we subsidize with our tax dollars will be tested, but not the boys at the top taking handouts. We even sanitize the language. The poor take evil "welfare" while the rich are "subsidized" with "job creating" public funds.

More than all of that, I’m bothered by how the NFL, the Ravens, the Vikings, and the University of Florida handled these situations. Forget for the moment about pampered individuals acting in moments of passion, rage, or arrogant foolishness, and consider the learned leaders – the boys at the top, who after careful deliberation in board rooms and consultations with law enforcement did literally the least they could do after investigating Rice, Peterson and Winston. They did just enough to say they’d done something – to cover their asses, but hardly enough to address the situations . . . that is until the public got a good look. The men leading these entities either don’t know what century we’re living in or they hold the spoiled child’s view of right and wrong: it’s only wrong when you get caught.

As long as we confer elite athletes with god-like status, some will act as if they are living exceptions to our rules.

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Philosophy Via Sitcom: Everything Happens For A Reason

“Everything happens for a reason.”

I cringe when I hear people say that, feeling a little like Sheriff Taylor on the Andy Griffith Show, the way he gently smirked, shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck when Opie or Goober mistook the true message in a teachable moment.

“Everything happens for a reason,” is usually an evasive misreading of what actually happened or worse yet, blatantly false. What’s more, it often feels like loser talk masquerading alternately as religious doctrine, superstition, Buddhism or folk wisdom.

I call it, “loser talk,” because it’s offered with a shrug of the shoulders after things don’t work out as hoped. Nobody ever wins a game, then pumps a fist in the air and shouts, “Oh, hell yeah! Things happen for a reason!”

There’s a classic episode of Andy Griffith when Andy is alerted by the feds that a delivery of gold will pass through Mayberry on the way to Fort Knox. He and Barney must provide security. Andy tells Barney and swears him to secrecy. Through a series of foolish, prideful stumbles, Barney tells person after person until all of Mayberry knows. Barney wants to blame it on town gossip – on the inevitability of the relentless forces of human nature, rather than blame his own actions.

I have experiences not unlike that in my real estate career. Clients will ignore my advice and make repeated decisions based upon false logic and ego, then when the bad thing happens that I warned them about, they very rarely say, “Wow, I blew it.” Instead, they shrug, “I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. Everything happens for a reason.”

 

If I’m lucky, they stop there. If I’m not lucky, they say, “Guess it just wasn’t in God’s plan.”

That makes me crazy. If there was a modern HBO version of Mayberry, Andy would say, “Now Barney, don’t blame God for the convoluted clusterfuck of bad choices you made.”

People want to blame the great beyond, when they ought to blame themselves.

I realize sometimes things really do happen for a reason. Aunt Bea carefully and lovely makes a pie with a flakey crust she fills with fresh apples and lots of sugar and cinnamon. Floyd the Barber coos, “Oooo, Bea, that’s gooood pie!” The pie was good, “for a reason.” Earnest T. Bass throws a brick through the jewelry store window and Andy takes him to jail. Earnest T. Bass went to jail, “for a reason.”

Cause and effect, plain and simple.

But that’s not what people mean when they say, “Everything happens for a reason.” They’re talking mysticsm. They’re talking fate and inevitability, as if there’s nothing they could have done to make things turn out differently.

That’s rarely true.

In one episode of Andy Griffth, Gomer outsings Barnie to win a spot on the Mayberry choir. If, “Everything happens for a reason,” is the mantra Barney repeats over and over to make peace with his disappointment, I accept that as reasonable. But if it’s the salve Barney rubs on his wounded ego – as if the unknowable blackness of the universe meant for him to fail, then I think he’s missing the point of the failure. Take singing lessons! Practice! But stop blaming fate!

And sometime things in fact don’t really happen for any reason whatsoever.

Truth is, I’m also in the, “Shit Happens,” camp. I’d like to think Howard Sprague would be in that camp with me. I can imagine his reasoning, professorial tone explaining to Thelma Lou that “there’s a lot of chaos in the world, entropy if you will, and so sometimes shit just happens.” Howard would explain to a disbelieving Thelma Lou in his familiar rising and falling notes that, “God didn’t pre-ordain everything and there’s no pre-written script dictating what will happen at every given moment to every single person. I think there are thousands or millions of possibilities depending on which turn you take or choice you make.”

"God doesn't direct every moment on earth?" Thelma Lou asks, searchingly." Howard answers with two words, "Free will."

If there’s ever a positive connotation to, “Everything happens for a reason,” it’s when offered in retrospect, when one realizes they’ve ended up in a good and happy place, despite the fact that something bad happened to them in the past, like they were meant to face that earlier obstacle so they could find true success later, somewhere else. Let's imagine Andy with his third season girlfriend, Helen Crump, looking back on his first season girlfriend, Ellie Walker. He might think he was always meant to find happiness with Helen, but first had to be tested by a breakup with Ellie. But I don’t believe that. When bad things happen, we adjust and learn, making the best of the situation we’re left in. If we’re really trying, it makes sense we’d end up in another good place. It doesn’t mean it was meant to be, it means we made-do with our situation. If the shit hadn’t happened with Ellie, and there’s no reason to believe it was inevitable, Andy wouldn’t need to hook up with Helen in season three. But things didn’t work out and so he adjusted and made things work with Helen.

Meant to be? Happened for a reason? That’s storybook talk. Andy made-do and Helen was a great gal. Isn’t that enough?

I think sometimes the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason” is a like that single, pathetic bullet in Barney’s shirt pocket. Maybe people who say it lack intellectual or emotional ammo. They just have the one single bullet-phrase to explain the disappointment of failure. And the unthinking use of the phrase by otherwise intelligent people, like that lone bullet Barney has – meant for a gun with six chambers, is an embarrassment.

Though I’m an outspoken guy, most of the time I ignore it when people pointlessly say, “Everything happens for a reason.” Just as Sheriff Taylor most often would, I purse my lips, smile knowingly and say nothing. 

It would take too long to explain all this anyway.

My Affirmative Action Program

In the wake of events in Ferguson, I’ve had many discussions with folks about race and often come away saddened by the quick, self-satisfied judgments I hear white folks make. I’m not saying that everything coming from the African American community sounds entirely rational either, but I’m not immersed in their world, I’m immersed in mine, and it’s mostly white. I’ll speak to what I know. It’s an American history that for some reason, some of my peers never think to apply to their own success and comfort.

I’ll call this history, “My Affirmative Action Program.”

My grandfather Meyer grew up in a poor German-speaking farming family in northern Indiana in the early 20^th Century. He went to school with his German heritage in tact. In fact, though all 12 of his siblings were born in America, they didn’t bother speaking English until they went to school – good schools by international standards at that time. As a young man he took that work ethic and education to the nearest small town, married my grandmother and got a job at the post office. It was a good gig for the 1920s.

I imagine the African American version of my grandfather. That man’s grandparents were slaves. His ancestor’s culture, religion, language were all beaten out of the generations that led up to him. And if he had a school, it likely wasn’t as good as the one-room schoolhouse my grandfather had. He too probably grew up in hard circumstances, but there was no post office job for him. Though he might have been a janitor at a post office making a fraction of what my white grandfather earned.

I once interviewed a local African American woman whose husband was the rarest of 1930s black men. He got a degree in chemistry at IU. After graduation he applied for a job at Eli Lilly. But he was told, “The only job we’ve got for you involves a broom and a mop.”

My grandfather wasn’t ambitious enough to get a degree at IU, but he qualified for a better job than his black IU peer. That IU chemistry grad never used his degree.

My grandfather learned that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded. What did the black IU grad learn? I’m guessing he didn’t learn the same lesson from his experiences that my grandfather learned from his. He might have learned a bitterness that white people couldn’t understand.

When my grandparents’ two sons went to school, my grandmother got a job as a secretary. They bought a house in the 1930s and built equity with each payment. As they approached retirement, they built a new house and paid cash.

My grandparents were good, hardworking people. There’s nothing in the rewards of their hard work to apologize for.

My grandparents’ sons went to good white schools in an all white small town and both my father and his brother then went to Purdue and got engineering degrees in the 1950s.

Jim Crow laws were still in affect. It didn’t just keep the black versions of my father and uncle from white lunch counters and front rows in the bus, it kept them segregated in poorly funded schools. Few made it to college. I wonder how many blacks were at Purdue getting engineering degrees in the 1950s. The degrees weren’t handed out like candy. My dad and my uncle, worked hard, they struggled, but they did it with an opportunity that was systematically kept from their black counterparts. Their black counterparts likely lived with a bitterness that white people couldn’t understand.

Yet, there is nothing about the college degrees that my dad or uncle need apologize for. 

In my little Indiana hometown in the 1960s and ‘70s I went to safe, nurturing schools. I was blessed. I was born white and middle class in 1960 in an all-white town, attended an all-white school, and learned along side kids whose families had not-so-different backgrounds from mine. I say "blessed" because these were places with the best resources, where the spoils of earlier generations were concentrated so that even if you were white, poor, and uneducated, there were radiating waves of economic activity that provided you with a good job. And because you were white, you and your children were welcome to climb a ladder not so easily available to those of the wrong color.

My dad’s engineering job put me in a big house on a nice street with virtually zero-crime. And there was enough money to send my mom to night school and summer classes. She got a teaching degree and eventually a teaching job.

Though I didn’t try very hard in high school, I still got into college. I wonder how many of my African American counterparts could say they day-dreamed their way through high school and still got into college in the 1970s. I grew up watching black people on TV behave with a bitterness I couldn’t understand.

As a young man my grandmother sent me money every Christmas – first $100, and eventually a $1,000 each year. I once bought a trip to Europe with that cash. Later I used the money to pay for the raising of children. I would eventually build a career for myself as a small-business person, working, literally, sometimes seven days a week, earning every single paycheck. I still do.

There’s nothing in my success to apologize for. But I had a leg up. Over and over again.

Fast-forward to the year I turned 40. After my grandmother died a check arrived in my mailbox for $60,000. The only thing I did to earn that was to have the right DNA. It was my cut of the estates of a frugal postal worker and secretary. I’m not sorry I got it. I’m proud of my family heritage. But I’m Christian-enough to wonder about my African American counterpart – the grandson of the man who couldn’t get a post office job in the 1920s because his skin was black – the son of a man who didn’t go to college in the 1950s like my dad did because his skin was black and his own dad didn't get the post office job – and so as a result, he’s the same guy who didn’t get annual Christmas checks and then a big one for $60,000 like I did.

I invested that money in my home and my kids’ college funds.

Two of my kids have graduated college – the youngest is still in college. They have no apologies to make for their opportunities. But are they encountering black peers who grew up with a bitterness that is hard for them to understand?

I’m gonna guess yes.

It’s over 100 years since my grandparents were born into a country where being white meant unlimited possibilities if you were wiling to work hard, and being born black meant 2^nd class status and limited opportunities, no matter how hard you worked . . . and then you were judged deficient for all the things you didn't accomplish. The money my grandparents earned in their privileged position is still at play in the lives of their grandchildren and great grandchildren – giving us an affirmative action program that wasn't available to everybody.

To this very day, research shows that black students are more likely to be expelled than white children for the same infractions. Reviews of arrests and sentencing records show the exact same disparity in our criminal justice system. Current research also shows that blacks who apply for jobs, home loans, and apartments are more likely to be rejected than their white counterparts with equal education and employment records. My black friends tell me, “If you think racism isn’t alive and well in America, you’re a fool.” It is a common feature of their lives. But it’s not out in the open anymore, it’s gone underground.

I’m not asking for any new law nor a new government program to fix this disparity. I’m simply asking my peers to stop callously judging struggling African American communities with questions like, “What’s wrong with those people?” or, “Why are so many of them in jail?” or “Why are they so angry? You can get ahead if you’ll just work hard and act right.”

I want my peers to think about their own family history and acknowledge the privileged shoulders of those they stood on to grab the success they found in life. I want them to be a little less self-satisfied and certain in the superiority of their own effort and a little more empathetic of those who’ve had less opportunity. If you don't know what I'm talking about, consult the Bible.

I don’t want my peers to apologize for their success or their peaceful, safe communities. I simply want them to broaden their view and acknowledge the obvious truths of American history and the affirmative action program people like us had.

There “but for the grace of God” I went, lucky that my grandparents were born white in early 20^th Century America rather than black.

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This Summer's Wedding

Sean

As June bled into July, it seemed I was in a protracted stage play where the actors each made timely, carefully choreographed entrances.

Late June, mid-morning, the first actor loped from behind the curtain of my kitchen doorway. It was the groom–my adopted son Sean, a week ahead of schedule with that familiar vandalous grin spread across his sharp jaw.

Jack

Chika & Cal

On a Saturday some ten days later, through the windshield I saw my son Jack’s broad shoulders pop through an automatic door at the Indy airport. He’s the best man, home from Denver with a trimmed beard and fresh haircut. The next day, their brother, Cal sprung from his mom’s car in my driveway, tall and lean with a travel-wearing smile. He and his Japanese girlfriend, Chika had come from Tokyo. She introduced herself to me with a firm handshake. Soon thereafter the bride, Courtney arrived from Ohio, her signature lion’s mane of blonde hair framing that happy, childlike face.

Courtney

A year ago right now, my kids were all living here. Since then they’ve each flown the coop. But for that week this house where my kids grew up was wonderfully full again.

 

Josh, the blonde, longhaired, bearded, barnstorming musician and groomsman entered the stage early in the week in time for beers and a pool party. His ready laughter was written deep in the week’s script.

Josh

Seeing Sean and Courtney’s accumulated relationships appearing one at a time in the form of family and old friends, reminded me of all the people we touch and who touch us as we move through life. There were cookouts, bar meet-ups and late night conversations around the kitchen table.

Schweke

Some of those who played serious rolls or mere cameos first arrived at my house years ago on bicycles or skateboards in their early teens. Now they’re college grads spread across the country and around the world.

 

Jake

I don’t really recall when Schweke showed up, but he’s hard to miss with a face that never ages and a 1,000-watt smile. When I headed up the stairs to bed Wednesday night, I think he was the one who asked me to leave the front door unlocked. “Jake’s gonna arrive in the middle of the night from Nashville.” When I came down in the morning, Jake was asleep on the couch, an arm thrown across his face. He opened one eye and waved.

 

Michael

Later that day as I sat alone drinking a beer at a picnic table at Bonge’s in Perkinsville, waiting for the bachelor party to float down White River from Anderson, a fresh-faced young man wandered down the road toting a heavy backpack. He looked lost. I noted, then ignored him, then dashed down to the river to pull sun burnt and drunken groomsmen from their canoes & kayaks. The young man with the backpack was still waiting along the road when we returned to the restaurant. Turned out it was one of Sean’s college buddies, Michael, linking up with the group.

Dan

And Courtney’s brother Dan, too, found a place on my living room floor. A gentle soul with and a kind, sober-face, Dan would pass the time throwing Frisbee out front on Cherry Street.

The accumulated scenes played out at bars and restaurants, on patios and pools, and even on the river during that week were a testament to the rich relationships Sean and Courtney have created in their young lives. During the rehearsal dinner I looked about and noted common threads among those faces. None are shallow or foolish, no hot messes, no macho jerks, no lost souls. Not a one you wish would hurry up and go home. All are well-grounded young people composing the next act in their lives – taking new jobs, marrying, moving to new places.

The groomsmen at Bonge's: drunken & sunburnt

Birds of a feather.

There was a lot of beer, and some fun-loving craziness here and there, but more often there were thoughtful conversations about life, faith, love, and the possibilities that lay ahead. We are just past the clustered years of graduations with this group, and entering the years of weddings. When your kids are little people tell you to savor the moments, because they’ll grow up before you know it. Fear not. I enjoy the company of my children and their friends more now than ever.

Courtney & Sean at the wedding

And appreciating those faces, loving having them drinking beer on my patio or crashing on my couch reminds me that Sean and Courtney’s real journey didn’t start the way we often think of it – on the wedding day. Instead, they were already deep into the journey by that time, and the people who took the stage here were the proof – the ones they’d already gathered up along the road; the sympathetic souls that make up a circle of friends.

The wedding was held far from plastic-covered subdivisions and asphalt-ringed stip malls. It was in a grassy patch beneath tall ancient trees, ringed on all sides by cornfields – a place that still looks like Indiana. It went off without a hitch with each player reading his lines to perfection.

And as quickly as they came, they stepped off stage, scattering across the world, back to their personal journeys: gone in the morning, or dropped at the 
airport, or pulled away from the curb.

Buy Kurt's book: Noblesville
Visit Kurt's web page

REBUILDING A NOVEL

When River’s Edge Marketing came to me last year and asked to reedit, repackage and remarket my first novel, Stardust, I was amazed. I thought the ship had sailed on that old story. That somebody thought it still had a chance at a wider audience outside of Indiana was exciting.

It took me back to the brief excitement of 13 years ago when I signed with the original publisher. But that excitement quickly turned to frustration. The best example of that first fractured publishing experience came they asked to cut a chapter. They said that chapter’s story line was one tragedy too many. I explained that I was simply writing what had actually happened in the small town of Noblesville in the summer of 1893. It was reality that was crucial to the entire story. “Nobody will believe that,” they said. I became suspicious they were just trying to cut the book for length instead of quality. So I suggested, “It would be far better to cut this other chapter and keep the one you want to cut.” Before I could finish my sentence, they say, “YES! Then let’s cut that one.”

 

The original cover.
Hate the color. Love the image

I was right. They were cutting for length only.

I challenged the logic. They claimed the average best-seller was approximately 333 pages. I replied, “That’s meaningless. When I’m in the car with my daughter, the average age of passengers is nearly 24-years-old. But I’m 41 and she’s 6 (at the time), so averages can send you in the wrong direction if you don’t see them for what they are. Mitch Albom’s Tuesday’s With Morrie is 192 pages, and John Grisham’s A Time To Kill is 515 pages. Both best sellers. Why don’t we edit for quality, not length?”

The frozen silences on the conference call betrayed pursed lips and knitted brows around a conference room table in Portland. They were no doubt thinking, “Kurt’s a difficult artist. He’s not a team player.” At least that’s how they treated me from that moment on.

I would later discover that they were in financial trouble and just pushing product out the door as fast as possible, in some cases to get authors off their backs, and in others hoping that something would catch fire and make some quick money. Within a couple months of my book’s publication, they were bankrupt. I spent two years marketing the book, doing book talks, sending press releases to newspapers, and stocking stores myself. I eventually sold all 5,000 of the copies that were printed.

Eleven years later, the folks at River’s Edge saw the weaknesses in the pages of that original manuscript and suspected that with more professional editing it could reach a wider audience. I flew to Little Rock, Arkansas last January and signed a contract. Stardust would live on.

The new editor worked like a therapist, seldom making bold pronouncements, but mostly asking of weak or tedious points in the story, “How does that make you feel?” constantly urging me to listen to the voice at the back of my head. “If it doesn’t feel entirely right, it isn’t right. Trust the voice.”

What resulted is a tighter story, less pontificating–which I am prone to, more of the soul of the story–the romance between David and Mary. And the technology that constantly simmmered at the background of the original was updated to reflect how smart phones, wifi, and the Internet have affected our lives in the past decade.

Last January, in a Little Rock conference room that looked out over the Arkansas River and a high bluff beyond, I was asked to give a synopsis of the book to the marketing department. They listened carefully. Finally a man about my age asked, “What does Stardust mean?” I quickly realized he had no knowledge whatsoever of the song Stardust, written by Hoosier songwriting legend Hoagy Carmichael and the most recorded love song of the jazz era. “How is that possible?” I thought to myself. But he was smart. Yet he didn’t know. Anyone would know by the end of the book, but we were debating how to get them to open it and read the first page. On the flight home I kept replaying that conversation in my mind, finally realizing that it was a very smart question.

He then slid the original book out onto the table. “Let’s say I’m walking down the main aisle of a Barnes and Noble and I see this cover on a stack of books on a table among a vast stack of other books. What is that cover supposed to mean to me?”

I stammered some vague comment like, “The past is a foreign country and the cover conveys a compelling lost language that kinda evokes the past, blah, blah, blah.” Truth was, I mostly just thought it was cool.

The new cover created by Paula at River's Edge Media.

He shook his head, smirked, pushed himself away from the table and folded his arms, “I don’t get it.”

It didn’t insult me. Didn’t hurt my feelings. I like having my feet held to the fire and having to defend what I’ve done. But if he didn’t understand, how many other people wouldn’t understand? In the end this can’t be me trying to figure it all out on my own, like it was first time around. These are trained professionals. I decided to let them do their jobs. It felt right.

Back to the title. Neil Gaiman’s highly successful book called Stardust created problems for us. If readers went looking for my book, they would first find Gaiman’s. My title had to go. That was tough to accept. But again, it made perfect sense. Easier to retitle my book than unpopularize Gaiman’s book. My very fitting title had to go. When the editor and I kept coming up empty handed, Paula, in the River’s Edge marketing department said, “Why not just call it “Noblesville?”

For a split second, it sounded dumb, but it sounded smarter and smarter as each day passed. Every step of writing the story I was trying to evoke a sense of place and to respect that place as Indiana. Why not make the boldest and simplest of statements about place and name it for the town where it's set, “Noblesville.” Paula not only renamed the book, she designed the new cover.

Smart girl.

So here I am, 22 years after I started writing the story, it’s being published for a second time with a new title and a new cover, leaner, at 15+ pages shorter, and it’s more expressive than it was first time around. Thanks to the folks at River’s Edge, it’s a better story by far than the one published a dozen years ago.

We're still in the very early stages of placing the book in retail locations, but a few options are already online. It can be bought in the town of Noblesville currently at The Wild Bookstore.

Books from River's Edge Media 
Buy Noblesville from Amazon
Buy Noblesville for the Nook