"That's some catch, that Catch 22"

"That's some catch, that Catch-22. 

"It's the best there is."

Those lines stuck in my head in 1969 and never left. I heard them again in the Hulu iteration of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." It was good to hear those words said aloud on a big smart TV. It acknowledges the elegance of the term, its evil logic. Yossarian would be crazy to fly the increasing number of combat missions. To get out of them, all he has to do is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane and thus must fly more missions.

Fifty years ago, we could easily see the parallel for our times. Yossarian would have to be crazy to go to Vietnam and fight strangers. All he has to do to get out of it is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane enough to go. It was a bind many of us found ourselves in.

Yossarian summed it up his self-centered beliefs during a talk with Clevinger who would soon disappear into a cloud. "The enemy is anyone who's gonna get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

We knew the people trying to get us killed in 1969. Johnson/Nixon/Westmoreland/Selective Service System. Also, our family and neighbors and teachers and all the people who were solidly behind the war. Fast-forward to this generation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its architects -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- and you can see through recent history what Heller was getting at.

In the Hulu version, by executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Yossarian is a wide-eyed antihero and a self-centered jerk. His acts of self-preservation hurts others. He whines and complains. He retreats to the hospital. As the scenes add up, it becomes increasingly clear that he is correct in his assumption that everyone is trying to get him killed. Still, he goes on his bombing missions, eager to drop his bombs so the planes can escape the flak field and he has one less mission to fly. The horrors multiply until Yossarian reveals Snowden's secret in the back of the B-25 (one of the book's proposed titles was "Snowden's Secret").

The most telling scene thus far comes at the end of the second segment, when Yossarian reaches out of the bombardier's window in mid-air and tries to erase a spot of blood. During the previous mission, the plane next to his is hit by flak. The plane's bombardier, his body streaked with blood, slides across the glass on his way to his doom. He leaves behind a bloody trail and we see the look of horror on Yossarian's face. On the next mission, some of the blood remains and Yossarian attempts to scrub it off, as if he could banish all of the blood that he has seen and will see. The music accompaniment: is Benny Goodman's "Goodbye," which can't be meant irony-free.

I finished watching the series late one night. That seemed somehow appropriate. There were plenty of laughs, many absurdities. The final scenes are eerie as Yossarian confronts the secret they all share and the blood of the innocents causes him to ditch his bloody uniform for the duration. Catch-22 loyalists may not like the last scene. It's not as hopeful as the one Yossarian chooses in the book. He revels in Orr's survival and his escape from the war. He contends to duplicate it or die in the attempt.

The Hulu series does not give Yossarian an out. The look on his face after yet another bombing run says it all.

Clooney and Heslov made other changes to the narrative. They work, for the most part. I missed Chief White Halfoat and Dunbar. Major ____ deCoverly gets very little to do. In the beginning, I thought it seemed a bit dated, maybe because we have been through so many absurdities (and absurdist fiction) since World War II spawned the book. And now, Trump, a true Scheisskopf, claims our attention.

Maybe it's not so dated after all.

It just doesn't end. There are so many enemies, those who want to kill us for nebulous reasons. Norman Mailer, another World War II combat veteran, said that Heller takes "his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him." That may be the biggest secret of all. Life is a trip through hell. Our assignment, should we choose to accept, is to make it heaven without losing our souls. At 18, "Catch-22" gave me an inkling of the challenges ahead of me. At 68, I see the road I traveled, how many choices I had to make along the way. I suppose that's the gift and curse of aging. Sometimes we get a little gift, such as the resurrection of a beloved book, to ease the journey.

The most thoughtful article on Hulu's "Catch 22" was by Jeffrey Fleishman in the L.A. Times, "Why Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' is a relevant antiwar satire in the age of Trump." You have to get by the firewall, but read it at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-catch-22-novel-hulu-20190515-story.html

In finding fault with Heller's depictions of female characters, he refers to Susan Straight, the writer who teaches a fiction class on love and war at UC Riverside. She lambastes Heller's treatment of women, especially the nurses. Most serve as just sex objects, an oversight that the producers try to remedy in this adaptation.

The following paragraph wraps up the article. To me, it sums up the real byproducts of war -- the damage done to the men who fight them, and the damage they do to the people who love them.

Straight’s memoir “In the Country of Women,” which will be published later this year, reflects in part on women in her family who endured their own private battles. “I’m writing about the women who fled all the men who had been in war,” she says. “My ancestors survived the men who survived the cannons and they were terrible men.”

Of course, you don't have to go to war to be a terrible man. Draft-dodger Trump is proof of that. But in "Catch-22," we see the bullet and the damage done.

My sporty new rollator walker is safe at any speed

I own a  Drive Nitro Euro-Style Tall Aluminum Four Wheel Rollator. It's one of the new breed of assistive devices that allow people like me to get from one place to another. Commonly known as a walker. A device to help this injured biped walker walk.

On the last snowy day in May 2018, I fell on my rear end in a Fort Collins parking lot. I got up and brushed the wet snow off of my butt and continued the day's routine, which included moving my daughter into an apartment. My wife noticed my wet jeans. "Your butt's wet," she said. "And so is yours," I said in a playful retort. We laughed, our daughter looking on in bemusement and a little bit of love, although impatient to get on with the task.

You think that there are days that don't matter, They all matter.

Four days later, I awoke with a terrible backache. I don't believe in backaches. I've had them after long backpacks up steep slopes, many miles on my racing bike, a series of pickup b-ball games on the asphalt. But this was a raging backache, one beyond my ken. A few days later, I began to limp. A few days later still, I had trouble walking and I dug out my knee-replacement cane for balance. I grew worried. I consulted my knee guy. He x-rayed my knees and hips and said all was well with those parts. I was relieved as I didn't want to revisit the pain of another knee replacement. The doc prescribed PT. Ten days later, the PT guys saw me limping into the center using a walker, me dragging my left foot. They grew alarmed.

"We sent you out of here two years ago and you were walking just fine," they asked. "What happened?"

"Fell on my keister."

They conducted a few exercises and pronounced that something was wrong that they couldn't address. "We have to talk to the doc," they said.

The doc called me at home the next day. He had made an appointment with a neurologist and urged me to go. I went. The neurologist conducted some tests. She thought my brain was fine but my spine may be injured. She sent me to a spinal surgeon in Fort Collins who operated on Aug. 1. A few days later, I felt more mobile, especially mu upper body. That was the part I was most worried about. I had nightmares about lifeless arms with fingers that couldn't type. That was not to be the case. Read my post about the surgery at https://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2018/08/a-return-trip-to-mind-eraser-may-help.html

Eight and one half months later, I still use a walker. I started with a standard aluminum walker with four rubber-tipped legs. You could always hear me coming. I lifted the walker, smacked the floor a couple feet ahead, and then moved to catch up with the device. You could hear me coming from one end of the house to the other. I stooped over because we borrowed the walker from a short person. My arms and shoulders hurt. I looked like one of those old guys slouching across the retirement home cafeteria. I located a taller walker at a retirement center, this one with two wheels on the front axles. I could stand tall and move faster. I thought I had reached the pinnacle, walker-wise.

I had seen four-wheeled walkers and thought this was the next step. I wanted my next step to be on two feet with any assist coming from my cane. That wasn't to be. I tried the cane for a few days and abandoned it when I fell getting into my car. I tried to get up but couldn't. A young couple driving by saw me sprawled in the street and guessed I was having a problem. They rescued me, guided me into the car, probably wondering "this old guy drives?" If asked, I would have told them that my right leg is fine but it's just the left leg and back and upper spine that torment me.

The world looks a little different when looking at it from a walker. Back when I was fully abled, I remember resting my eye upon someone in a walker as they passed. I walked, my legs perfectly fine. I barely noticed people using assistive devices. Now that I've joined the club, I see them everywhere. They were there all along but I looked through them or over them, barely giving them a thought. As a bleeding heart liberal, I feel empathy. But the dirty truth is this: you don't know the pain of disabilities until you're disabled. We don't want to admit that it can happen to us. And then it does, and you get a glimpse of what some people face their entire lives.

War, disease, accidents all leave damaged bodies in their wake. I read recently that 5 percent of adults in the U.S. use helper devices such as canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. Our town has an older population. We also are home to a major military base and a V.A. Hospital. Back when I swam laps at the YMCA, I would encounter the disabled vets from the V.A. doing their water exercises. Some of them had to be plucked from their wheelchairs and lowered into the water using a crane bolted to the side of the pool. I would watch without really watching, as I was sure these men got their share of stares when they were out in public. The other day as I rode one of the Y's stationery bikes, the swimming pool director told me that I could use the crane in the pool if I wanted to get back in the water. I thanked her but cringed inwardly. Is that why I had been avoiding the pool? I didn't want to be one of those disabled guys who needed the crane?

People do stop me to admire my colorful ride. I was putting Nitro in my trunk at Olive Garden the other day when a middle-aged woman stopped and admired it. She said she wanted to upgrade her mother's walker. I told her how to order and she left. The humor in my situation is pretty obvious. My Nitro walker is fire-engine red and vampire black. People admire it as they would a cherry '57 Chevy or bucket-T roadster. In some future place, old people will stage races that pits Nitro against Lightning. These are short-track races, sprints. A Daytona 500-style race would go on for months. We could fill in gaps in NASCAR's off-season schedule.

This reminds me of a story from my first collection, "Safe at Any Speed." In it, Florida retirees soup up their golf carts and stage races at an abandoned airstrip near Ormond Beach. Lest you think this complete fantasy, golf carts are now called golf cars. And for good reasons. You can spend $9,500 on one designed like a sky-blue 1957 Chevy Bel Air. This is a couple steps up from my Nitro, I can see myself tooling around in something similar when I retreat to a retirement village.

My disability is short-term, or so I tell myself. It has taught me one thing: people go out of their way to offer me assistance. This is especially true as I haul groceries to the car. One woman, possibly older than me, didn't ask as she edged me aside to load groceries in my trunk. I thanked her as she buzzed off. I got the impression that she is not a person who waits around for permission. Airmen, elderly, mothers with kids -- all have offered help. I usually refuse as I stubbornly avoid accepting assistance.  Humility is at risk. Humility can be dangerous. It  can lead to empathy and, God knows, we could use more of that in these cruel times.

Keep up with the arts scene at WyoFile's Studio Wyoming Review

WyoFile periodically runs art reviews in its Studio Wyoming Review section. I, periodically, write one of those reviews. My latest appeared on April 9. The subject was "The Art Of Assemblage" exhibit at Blue Door Arts in the Hynds Building downtown. Read it here.

Running through the review is some commentary on the role of the arts in Cheyenne's downtown redevelopment. I moved my family from Fort Collins to Cheyenne in the summer of 1991. The people we met thought we were crazy moving from a cool university town to a cold and windy Wyoming burg. Those same people escaped to FoCo when the roads were passable. It boasted good food, swinging bars, lots of concerts and other activities. It also had a lively downtown.

Cheyenne had none of those things. "There's nothing to do in this town" was the constant refrain, and not only from my kids. Downtown was a ghost town after 5 when the staties (like me) went home.

A lot can change in 28 years. I mentioned some of them in my last post. New restaurants opening. Condo complex even going up, probably the first new residences built downtown since World War II. I dropped by West Edge Collective's parking lot yesterday to buy a six-pack at the Pufkins food truck. It's Cheyenne Restaurant Week and pufkins (muffin-style pancakes) are $10 for six and I bought a couple of breakfasts' worth. Tomorrow I am getting some $1 tacos at La Paz ("Best Tacos y Burritos") on 18th Street just catty-corner from Danielmark's Brewery. IPA first, then tacos.

But wherefore the arts? I have been writing about them for years, both as writer/editor at the Wyoming Arts Council and as a free-lancer. The future looks good for a concert space at the old Lincoln Theatre. The Civic Center offers a great new line-up of events. The summer outdoor concert season will begin as soon as we get all of the snow out of the way. I'll be writing more about the arts in Cheyenne and around the region as time goes by. See you soon.

Cheyenne girds its loins for first boom since Hell on Wheels

I am surrounded by nuclear missiles. They lurk in their hidey-holes on the rolling prairie of Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado. I give little thought to them on most days. I sometimes drive past F.E. Warren AFB's main gate and see the three Cold War missiles that greet passers-by. Convoys of missileers pass me on the highway on their way to their `24-hour shifts underground. A recent CBS 60 Minutes piece spoke of the antiquated launch equipment at Warren. This gave me pause, as "antiquated equipment" is not a term you want to associate with our nuke strike force. It's bad enough when films of the 1960s scared us with untoward nuke launches. Col. Jack D. Ripper went a little funny in the head and plunged us into a celluloid Armageddon. While the fail-proof fail safe system showed its flaws, our bomber crews carried out their mission. And the Russkis Doomsday Machine went off without a hitch.

So, when 60 Minutes showed that our local launch equipment is falling apart, that our airmen and airwomen are using computers from the Stone Age to take care of Space Age missiles, the Pentagon sprang into action.

It's a good thing that the U.S. Government is funneling taxpayer dollars ($90 billion) to Boeing and Northrup-Grumman to modern our nuclear capabilities. Cheyenne is agog that at least $5 billion of that will be spent locally. Boeing, one of the contractors, will hold a meeting April 11 for businesses "to learn about program support and Boeing supplier needs." N-G cannot be far behind with its own round of meetings..

I scrolled through the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent web site -- GBSD Bound. In flowing language, the writers describe the past, present and future of this program. The Chamber eloquently supports all this. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades. Really good shades, as the flash of a thermonuclear fireball can melt the eyeballs.

It is good news for Cheyenne. Our capital city has experienced incremental growth the past five years. Many here say that this is the spillover effect from Colorado's boom. Cheyenne is the northern terminus to the Front Range. As such, it benefits when billions are being invested into infrastructure and businesses in Fort Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs. That same boom has caused Coloradans to question their devotion to a Denver filled with overpriced housing, crazy traffic, and herds of shaggy hipsters roaming the territory as bison once did prior to 1859. "This isn't the Colorado I knew" is a common refrain among family and friends in the Centennial State. They ponder moves to the wide-open spaces of Wyoming and Montana and Idaho if only someone would buy their two-bedroom house for $500,000 and some visionary start-up would pay them bundles of cryptocurrency to telecommute from Laramie. The cryptocurrency/blockchain thing is no joke. Our legislature has passed a dozen bills in support of this as-yet unproven e-currency but is scared shitless with the thought of brown or transgender people moving into their neighborhood. And damn that federal gubment (except when it brings $5 billion to town).

Despite my peacenik roots, I am fond of missiles and rockets. My father fed his large family by planting ICBM sites through the West. He worked as a contract specialist with the Martin Company, later Martin-Marietta. He didn't so much build the sites as find reliable people to do so. He later did the same job in Florida for the space program, helping get Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969, the year I graduated from high school. I saw Apollo 11 blast off. I canoodled with my girlfriend on the beach as we listened to the crackly car radio announce that "The Eagle Has Landed." My brother Dan and I spent our childhood building missile models and memorized all the names of the U.S. arsenal. I read all the Tom Swift books, in which rocketry played a key part. I watched Sputnik arc across the night sky. We were looking up, all of us. We did it together, maybe the last time that Americans were together on any one thing.

As we revamp our nukes, we are faced with new problems. The main one is in the White House, Donald Trump, buddy of the old Soviet spy who runs Russia. We have the North Koreans and Iranians. Saudi shenanigans. Dirty bombs from terrorists. Clean bombs from China. "Paranoia strikes deep/Into your life it will creep/It starts when you're always afraid/You step out of line, the man come and take you away."

We've come a long way from the so-called peace dividend we expected with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Remember that?

Cheyenne hasn't been a boom town since the Iron Horse rolled into town and Hell on Wheels was born. Its incredible growth back then earned it the nickname of "Magic City of the Plains."

Let's hope we're ready for this boom.

From facts and fragments and anecdotes, I make up a story

The high temperature for Denver on Feb. 18, 1950, was 53 degrees. The low was 22. That's according to the Farmers' Almanac online weather search app.

Anyone familiar with High Plains weather patterns would see nothing unusual in this. Yes, 53 seems pretty warm for mid-February. But not unusual. On Valentine's Day 2019 in Cheyenne, located 100 miles north of Denver along the Front Range, I wore a T-shirt outside as I took out the trash. Sunny, warm, no wind, 55 degrees. During these mid-winter thaws, temps in the 50s can seem like 70s. You can feel spring in the air, even though spring is a long way off and sometimes delivers worse weather than January or February.

Today's temp in Denver will barely break 20. We expect 15 in Cheyenne. Yesterday I forgot my gloves on a trip to the grocery store. Wind chill was so bad that my hands didn't defrost until I grabbed a fresh-baked loaf of Italian bread and held it close. I must have looked odd. An old guy, bundled for winter, leaning against his shopping cart, hugging a loaf of bread, sighing softly.

On this day 69 years ago, my parents were married in Denver. The photos from that day were shot inside, although the photog could have herded everyone out into the sunshine. My parents are young but not that young. Dad had spent his late-teens and early-20s engaged in World War II. He then went to college on the G.I. Bill. He was 26. My mom was 23, a nursing school graduate and a working nurse. The couple looks happy in their photos. Members of the wedding party, brothers and sisters, spouses and friends, smile at the camera. They all have been through a lot, Great Depression and global war, and look ready to take on the world.

It wasn't easy. It never is. All of the people in the photos are gone now. We are left with their frozen images. And memories. I was born exactly ten months later in Denver's Mercy Hospital. Although family stories say I was born in a snowstorm, that's not what's in the Farmers' Almanac. It was clear and sunny. The high temp was 51 and the low 27. A day much like my parents' wedding day. Mom said she was cleaning the oven when she went into labor. She was trying to take her mind off of the waiting. I like the story but have no way to check it out, as happens with many family stories. Time moves on, memory atrophies, and what we think we know is not accurate at all.

We have stories. The stories sustain us. That's what I'm discovering as I research a novel set 100 years ago in Denver. We know some facts. Denver existed. We have maps and census stats. Hundreds migrated to the Mile High City from other places. Four of them were destined to become my grandparents. They didn't know each other at the time but fate threw them together. They married and I can't tell you what the weather was like on those days because I don't know their anniversaries. With a bit of research, I could find out. But that's not the important thing to me. I've always wanted to know why they came to Denver. I know a few things about their trajectories from elsewhere to here. Grandpa Shay, a cavalry officer in World War I, sought medical help for his lungs at Fitzsimons Army Hospital. There, he met Florence Green, an army nurse from Baltimore. They fell in love, were married, and  produced my father in 1923. They are buried together at Fort Logan National Cemetery in southeast Denver. Surgeons removed one of my Grandpa Hett's diseased lungs and told him to get out of Chicago or the winters would kill him. He jumped on a train to the Rockies. Agnes McDermott took a road trip with her sister and gal pals to Colorado in the summer of 1919. She and her sis liked it so much, they returned to southern Ohio, packed up and moved to Denver. My Mom was their second child.

That's how I got to Denver in 1950.

Time plays a trick on us. When we are young, our relatives tell us stories but we are so self-absorbed that we don't listen. Later, when we can appreciate the stories, the tellers are gone. We know only fragments, anecdotes, stories. The rest, we leave to research and DNA tests. The stories are important because, even if they aren't quite true, they can tell us about people's hopes and dreams and sorrows. We may listen more than we think we do. We may absorb the hopes and dreams and sorrows of those people important to us. I like the idea of genetic memory, that the traumas of our ancestors can be passed along via our genes. This is scary if there is a genocide or war or abuse in your family tree. It also may tell us something about why we get beat down by depression or rejection.

Fiction writers have advantages unknown to genealogy buffs. We respect things that can be proved. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on such a date. The U.S. landed on the moon on such a date and such a location (f*** you, conspiracy junkies). But everything else is subject to interpretation. We make things up. We try to get our hard facts right so you believe the fiction. It's not so easy to compose fiction when you base your story on real people. You have to go off-script. Readers often ask, "Is that a true story?" People, even creative people, crave a lived experience. We also like fairy tales. We like to get the bejesus scared out of us by an evil clown that lives in the sewer. By dragons and orcs. By serial killers who enjoy their liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Today is a good day to remind myself that I was produced by people whose life stories are incomplete and will remain a mystery. I know a few fragments. From those, I can build a bigger story that can eventually be called a novel.

During a bad weekend for equality, I ponder the Catholic Church's social justice traditions

By now, everyone has viewed the video of the Catholic school boys mocking tribal elder Nathan Phillips on the National Mall.

To review, students from the all-boys Covington (Ky.) Catholic High  School are shown mocking Phillips as he beats the drum and chants the American Indian Movement song. Phillips is a member of the Omaha tribe, a Vietnam veteran, and one of the organizers of the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests of 2017. Videos show white school boys wearing MAGA hats. They also chant Trumpisms such as "build the wall." Obnoxious brats, sons of privilege. One wonders where their clueless hatred came from. One need look no further than our clueless hate-filled president, who mocks Native Americans with terms such as "Pocahontas" and references to the Wounded Knee massacre. They heard these things on talk radio or watched them on Fox News. Maybe they heard mockery of ethnic minorities around their house, from parents who shouted similar things at Trump rallies. Some teachers may be to blame, not so much for spouting racism but by failing to nip it in the bud. Certainly social media spreads the hate, although to blame the Internet for these boys' behavior is too convenient. It takes them -- and the rest of us -- off the hook. That's part of the problem.

Some Facebook commenters have urged the school to expel these students. Too easy. This is a teaching moment. Boot the kids from school and they will head off to the local suburban public school where they will remain smug in their ignorance. The Catholic Church has many teaching tools at its disposal. The New Testament, especially the Sermon on the Mount, is a good place to start. WWJD when confronted with a situation where empathy and understanding were called for? Phillips said in an interview that he was trying to insert himself into a brawl. He then tried to escape the melee but the smug-faced teen in the MAGA hat stood in his way. Here was a test to show what true Christianity looks like. Big fail, boys from Covington Catholic High.

The MAGA crowd loves to poke fun of "social justice warriors." Some of us, me included, proudly claim the term. Where did I learn the precepts of social justice? First, at home, then through the Catholic Church during mass and at Father Lopez Catholic High School. The nuns and priests and lay people taught us well. It's fashionable to criticize the church for its many transgressions throughout its 2,000 years. In recent history, we have the scandal of priest sexual abuse. Over he years, Catholic orphanages turned "unwed" mothers into pariahs and treated their young charges like cattle. The church loved its crusades and its bloody Inquisition. Spain and Portugal sent its men to the New World to convert the heathen and kill any who resisted. Nathan Phillips may be a product of one of many Catholic boarding schools, where youngsters were ripped away from their families and bullied into becoming good Catholics. The Catholic Church was a major player in the horror show of history.

It also offers me solace. Not lately, as I quit going to church. I used to find peace in the ritual of the mass. In adulthood, when sinking in the swamp pf depression, I found as much relief in prayer as I did from therapy and meds. I still pray. The main thing that turned me away from the church is what I sometimes refer to as its deal with the devil. The devil is represented by the evangelicals and their handmaidens, the Republican Party. The church decided decades ago that the war against abortion was more important than the spiritual health of its millions of members in the U.S. They allied themselves with the fundamentalists to impose a litmus test on its members. There are only a few questions on the test, I guess you can call it a quiz if you want. You are in the in-crowd if you oppose abortion, birth control, sex outside of marriage, women in leadership roles (including priests), and LGBT rights. This makes you a fellow traveler with the Evangelical Right Wing, a group whose roots are in anti-Catholic bigotry. Of course, Catholics did their own Protestant-bashing. When I was a kid, I was told it was a sin to go to a Protestant church service. I've sinned repeatedly in my adulthood.

So I'm a Cultural Catholic. My roots are in Catholicism but my present is not. I can't ignore memory. My final thoughts may be of a snippet of Latin from the old mass. My Irish grandfather and his rosary beads. Sister Norbert winding up to whack one of us misbehaving boys. Thankfully, I won't be thinking of how I hated Native Americans, Hispanic immigrants, Jews, Liberals, Obama, the transgender kid who just wants to use the bathroom, and all those other people who might look or think differently from me. I won't make others feel small so I can look big. That's a blessing right there.

LATER: Just returned from the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Tie Banquet at the Red Lion Inn. Full house. Sat at the Laramie County Democrats' table with Chris and Dem friends. Saw so many people I've met over the years, people I've met through the NAACP, Juneteenth and the arts. All of us were celebrating Dr. King. Guest Speaker was Dr. Olenda E. Johnson, Ph.D., a Cheyenne native who was the first African-American full professor at the U.S. Naval War College. Uplifting speech from an uplifting person. She talked about the late Wyoming State Senator Liz Byrd of Cheyenne who brought up the King holiday in the legislature nine times before it was finally adopted by that body's white majority. Talk about persistence and dedication. Now I'm home and realizing how wonderful it is to get out to meet people who make a difference day by day by day. Another blessing...

What it was like to be in England "The Summer Before the War"

The war was World War I or The Great War, as it was known before there was a second installment to worldwide slaughter. In the village of Rye in Sussex in England, the Edwardian Era was in full bloom. Men were men, women were women, and sheep grazed peacefully in verdant pastures. A young Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash, lands in the village. She still mourns the death of her father, a semi-famous poet. In Rye, she confronts the sexism of the time with great aplomb which caught this reader's attention right away. Her story is woven into those of Agatha Kent, a spunky middle-aged matron who lobbied to bring Beatrice to the local school. She also shelters her two nephews, Daniel, a foppish budding poet and Hugh, a medical student. The scene is set for this comedy of manners which eventually runs headlong into The Guns of August.

"The Summer Before the War" is Helen Simonson's second book and her first historical novel. She's done her homework, as far as I can tell. I am researching the same era in the U.S. for my novel "Zeppelins Over Denver," although a more accurate title might be "The Summer after the War." Only five years separate 1914 from 1919, but those years changed forever the very different worlds of Rye and Denver. The scope of those changes in Rye were perhaps more remarkable, given that the place had hundreds of years of history with pubs in buildings built in the 15th century. The settlement and later the city of Denver was but 60 years old in 1919, Colorado just 42 years into statehood and still possessed many of the traits of the frontier. Native Americans lived there for centuries but they were expendable during The Great Western Expansion, especially when gold was discovered in Cherry Creek. And we all remember the Sand Creek Massacre.

What happens when you deposit a crop of restless people into a restless place going through its own historic changes? A novel, I hope, a good one and publishable. Some 20 million people died in World War I and millions more in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919. More than a million U.S. soldiers went overseas and many returned changed in body and in mind. Nurses, too, women who had only imagined a quiet married life found themselves in bloody field hospitals while German shells exploded around them. Wars tumult sent many of them on the move to new places. Women would get the vote in 1920 and Prohibition began (Colorado got an early start in 1916). Racial strife spawned the "Red Summer" of 1919, when race riots flared in U.S. cities as black soldiers returning from war said they weren't going to take this shit any more. Working men went out on strike and were beat up and killed for their efforts. The Communists had turned Russia red. That "subversive" influence was felt in the U.S., and helped spawn the investigative unit that would eventually become J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. People traveled in automobiles and airplanes, even zeppelins. Jazz was the new sound and the Charleston the wild new dance.

What a time. I share Simonson's passion for the era. It involves digging into archives and digital records available through Google. War videos can be viewed on YouTube, and you can also listen to some great tunes such as "Come Josephine in My Flying Machine" and "How You Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm after They've seen Paree." The audio is tinny and scratchy which only adds to my listening pleasure. As I conducted research, it occurred to me that this entire generation is gone. A baby born in 1900, such as my Irish grandfather, would turn 119 this year. If you were born when the war ended, you would turn 101. There are some centenarians out there, but they are rare. Their collective memories lie within us, their descendants, and in the records they left behind. Their stories live on. However, it is through fiction that they really come to life.

Thus it is with Simonson's novel. Her leisurely writing style is reminiscent of the writers of the era, some of whom lived and worked in Sussex, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf. But a formal tone and leisurely pace does not a boring book make. Simsonson''s characterizations are sharp and her conflicts very real. Humor, too, a real penchant for satire with writers as her favorite target. She has a lively time portraying the Henry James-like Tillingham, the poet Daniel who, a few decades on, would be wearing a black beret and mumbling his poems in a smoky coffee house, and Beatrice's almost-but-not-quite-famous father.

SPOILER ALERT! The townspeople rise to the occasion when was breaks out. They welcome refugees from Belgium. However, when one of the young women, Celeste, turns up pregnant and its discovered she was raped by German soldiers, angry residents lobby to turn her out. When her father arranges for Celeste to go to a convent, Daniel, the foppish poet, agrees to marry her. While Simonson sets her book in a bucolic setting in the midst of a beautiful summer and fall, she doesn't want us to forget that humans are fallible, even horrid, creatures..

"The Summer Before the War" is published by Random House. The trade paperback sells for $17. Listen to the 2016 Diane Rehm NPR interview with Simonson at https://dianerehm.org/shows/2016-03-22/helen-simonson-the-summer-before-the-war

Part XIV: The Way Mike Worked -- How the Contract with America bit the NEA on the ass

The story resumes...

It's been a few weeks, but today I get back to my series "The Way Mike Worked," based on the Smithsonian-sponsored exhibit "The Way We Worked," featured in the Cheyenne library this fall. I've been busy with my novel and some free-lance writing assignments. These later chapters of my saga also take some research, as they deal with my time as an arts bureaucrat at the Wyoming Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. I lived the first four decades of my life clueless about the world of arts administration. For the ensuing 27 years, I lived and worked in that world. I'm still active as a volunteer. My hope is that we all will get a chance to promote the arts in our communities. Taking an active role in creativity may save us all. It may not, but we will have a much better time along the way.

On that day in D.C., I witnessed history.

On Tuesday, September 27, 1994, Rep. Newt Gingrich assembled 300 Republican candidates for a photo op in front of the U.S. Capitol. The occasion was the signing of the Contract with America, a document designed by Newt that featured 10 bills that Republicans hoped to pass once the 1994 Mid-term Red Wave led to a Republican majority.

I was just starting my second year in D.C. and still a new hand at inside-the-beltway politics. Did I have a gut feeling that Gingrich's contract would change my life? Not really. Curiosity moved me. That, and a request from my National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) boss that it would be good to keep an eye on Gingrich and his pals as we closed in on the November mid-term election.

That day, I skipped my usual Metro Station stop that led to a two-block walk to NEA offices in the Old Post Office, now a Trump Hotel. I rode all the way to Union Station to take in the event. Republicans had been promoting the gathering for weeks and I was curious. I also had a feeling that it would affect my stint at the NEA. Newt had waged war on Democratic Party policies since his election to Congress in 1979. He had been active in the culture wars, a vanguard in the Religious Right's fight against the NEA, NEH, sacrilegious art, naked art, hip-hop -- any creative strain within 1990s America that threatened The Word in the Bible and U.S. supremacy in the secular world. Not exactly the opening salvo in the struggle but one that would steer politics right into the Trump era.

In late September, D.C.'s oppressive summer bubble of heat and humidity was just beginning to release its grip. But that day at the Capitol, a Republican fever dream was being born in Newt's image.

On this day, Newt launched a war against Democratic Party policies. Total war, akin to Sherman's March through Georgia, which Newt wrote about in one of his novels that I never read. A continuation of Nixon's Southern Strategy, which convinced Southern whites that Republicans were on God's side and Democrats had forged an evil alliance with ethnic minorities, feminists, gays, and college-educated pacifists. It wasn't just that Dem policies were misguided and needed correcting. It was that the Dems were the enemy and needed to be crushed. It was like a Newt Gingrich alternative history. Except it was real and, like the Civil War, had lasting consequences.

Newt wasn't content with writing alternative histories. He actually wanted to make history. Whatever the subject, Newt wrote a book. He's written 18 non-fiction titles. He's authored or co-authored at least a dozen fiction titles. You have to hand it to him. Hatching an idea, writing, revising, finishing, publishing and promoting -- the writer's life is not for the meek. Newt had a platform, still does if you look at the plethora of new titles. It is clear he had a vision and he could write. This one-two punch proved dangerous for the liberal agenda. It was a gift to conservatives waging the culture wars.

As Newt bragged at that 1994 event:“Today, on these steps, we offer this contract as a first step towards renewing American civilization."

What did you do in the culture wars, daddy?

I am a veteran of the culture wars. I don't have any medals and I don't brag about my service. I'm a survivor, which is something to be proud of. For 25 years, I worked to nurture the arts on the local, state, regional and national level. It was fun and heart-breaking. I'm here to tell the story.

What, exactly, are the culture wars? The most significant battle on the national front was waged over explicit photographs of nude gay men and a photo of a crucifix soaked (allegedly) in a container filled with an artist's urine. The NEA helped fund a grant that funded the Robert Mapplethorpe photo exhibit at DC.'s Corcoran Gallery. The crucifix art, "Piss Christ", won the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art "Awards for Artists," also funded by the NEA. Hysterical press coverage followed and evangelical yokels such as Sen. Jesse Helms and  Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell stirred up their followers with tales of blasphemy and obscenity and misuse of taxpayer dollars because, as you know, the national arts budget is so bloated that it puts the defense budget to shame.  

Pause for laughter.

Meanwhile, the NEA found itself in the middle of a lawsuit when it yanked fellowships of four artists for their ostensibly offensive art. All of these offending artists were linked with Satan and all of the Coastal Elites. Pres. Clinton, an evangelical from Arkansas raised by a single mother, was somehow one of those elites. The Republicans aimed to sabotage every one of his programs. This wasn't the first time a combative Congress took on the opposition's sitting president. But it led to all the battles yet to come. 

When confronted with an African-American Democrat as president (a guy who made good the hard way), Republican leaders vowed that none of his programs would become the law of the land. What they failed to obliterate then, they now put in the ruinous hands of the current benighted resident of the Oval Office. The battle will now be joined by the new Democratic majority in the House. Let's hope that the Democrats' tendency for appeasement has been replaced by a need to kick ass and take names. There are some encouraging signs, such as Rep. Pelosi taking Trump to the woodshed this week over the government shutdown.

Let's get back to Newt. His goal was to destroy the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Museum and Library Services Office (MLS), all part of the same funding bill. That was not as easy as it sounded. Newt, in fact, ran into what other conservatives have discovered over the years, that Republicans support the arts and many have children who are schooled in the arts and grow up to become artists, arts consumers, even arts patrons. They have museums and performing arts centers named after them. They weren't so sure that depriving their city's symphony/art museum/ballet of tax dollars was the proper thing to do. They appealed to their moderate Republican Congresspeople (there were moderate Republicans back then) to teach the Democrats a lesson but don't go overboard for goodness sake.

Newt was faced with a problem. How to satisfy the newly-elected rural-state rabble-rousers and their urban and suburban counterparts who had all of the money. Cuts came, as did compromises. The Right liked the fact that the 1996 federal budget cut funding for the arts almost in half and eliminated troublesome fellowships in visual and performing arts. Newt could declare victory and his colleagues could brag about their success out in the hinterlands. And get re-elected in '96.

It led to my early departure from the NEA and a return to my job in Wyoming. It also had other results that were less well-known. The survival of the literary fellowships. That's a story in itself and worth another post. But first, I have to go back 20-some years and do some research. I like research, although sometimes its tentacles grab me and won't let go..

Next chapter: Newt Gingrich, the writer's friend?

Part XIII: The Way Mike Worked -- On the road to D.C.

My eight-year-old son Kevin and I were on our third day of cross-country travel from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Washington, D.C.

I had promised Kevin three things to coax him into traveling with me in the U-Haul. No. 1, each night on the road we would stay at a motel with a pool. No. 2, we would eat every meal at McDonald's. No. 3, we would take his dog, Precious, with us.

He asked if he could drive but I said no, even though I could have used some relief behind the wheel. But I did stick to the other three promises and on this, the third day, I had a bad case of heartburn to match my driver fatigue.

We were passing through the sliver of West Virginia between Ohio and Pennsylvania when I spied a rest area and stopped. It was Labor Day weekend and one of the service clubs staffed a coffee stop. I hit the restrooms and then the coffee stand staffed by a pair of middle-aged guys. As he poured my coffee, one of the guys asked where I was headed.

"Washington, D.C.," I said. "I start a job there Monday."

He nodded, handed me the Styrofoam cup. The coffee was as hot as the afternoon. "You aren't one of those Clinton fellas, are you?"

"Afraid so." I smiled. They didn't. I heard the Deliverance banjo playing in the background. I thanked them for the coffee and retreated to look for my son. Clinton fella? I guess that I was, although far down on the list, way below the political appointees and the thousands of full-time D.C. bureaucrats and the hangers-on that accompany any new administration.  The National Endowment for the Arts was borrowing me from the State of Wyoming because, as a writer from a flyover state such as West Virginia, my higher-ups thought that I would lend a new perspective to the work of the government arts agency. I had signed up for two years with a possible two-year extension. I was part of a pool of Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) employees that made their way to D.C. every couple years. There was a surge now as V.P. Al Gore was tasked with trimming the federal work force.

Kevin and I spent one more night on the road. We could have made it to Rockville, Md., by nightfall but our new house wasn't available until the next day.  The motel had a nice pool and we could see the golden arches from our room. This Clinton fella was pretty tired and tomorrow was moving-in day. Chris and our infant daughter Annie were flying in from Denver in the afternoon. Soon we would all be together in a new house in a new town. Chris was going to stay home with Annie while Kevin went to the third grade. We would try to survive on one mid-level bureaucrat's salary in one of the most expensive suburbs on the East Coast. North Bethesda -- that's what city leaders wanted to rename our section of Rockville. The new name would probably bring higher rents and higher prices all-around. Bragging rights, too, I guess.

But that was all ahead of us in this new adventure.

Part XII: The Way Mike Worked -- Welcome to Wyoming

INTRO: "The Way We Worked" exhibit wrapped up its stint at the Laramie County Public Library on Nov. 16. This Smithsonian-sponsored traveling exhibit features interactive displays on various aspects of working in the U.S. Technology plays a major role, as you might guess. Assembly lines, automated farm equipment, telephone switchboards, manual typewriters, and the dawn of the computer age. The exhibit has moved on to other libraries. But while it was here, it prompted me to look closely at my own work history. My final batch of posts have to do with my life as an arts administrator. It's a specialty I knew nothing about until I tried out several other career paths. I was clueless when I started in 1991 and, by the time I retired in 2016, I had a few clues. I feel it's my civic responsibility to share them with you, no matter how many words it takes. 

My first year as literature program manager at the Wyoming Arts Council got off to a rocky start.

But it might not have started at all.

I was so tentative with State of Wyoming application that I filled it out by hand instead of typing it. I don't know what I was thinking. Or if I was thinking. I almost had an advanced degree, which I thought would be a plus. But my only experience in arts administration was as a reluctant volunteer in my university's Fine Arts Series. My only grant request thus far, for the Colorado State University English Department's Visiting Writers Series, was turned down by Fort Fund, Fort Collins' local arts agency, despite my eloquent presentation to the grants committee. I was 0-1 in the grants department.

On the plus side, I was a published writer and well acquainted with the literary world after three years in an M.F.A. program. I did some research and discovered that there actually was an arts administration degree track at a number of universities. What did this kind of person do? A lot, as it turns out. Grants, yes, but a list of other things. Outreach to non-profits, budgeting, arts promotion and marketing, diplomacy with hard-headed politicians, schmoozing with rich patrons.

That last one did not figure in my research. But it's a real thing, as I found out over the years. I am a liberal but a pragmatic one. Many rich people are Republicans. That doesn't make them bad, despite the tenor of today's politics. Many of these rich Republicans have an abiding interest in one or more arts forms, usually those that involve large buildings for symphonies, opera, and the visual arts. Most do not fund avant-garde or political arts projects as that can lead to trouble when some rabble-rousing artist makes art that enrages community leaders. The free spirit in me loves the free spirit in others. As a bureaucrat, charged with spending taxpayer money responsibly, well, you can see the conflict. More on this topic later.

My background in the arts was limited. I didn't attend a live symphony performance until well into adulthood. I was in my 40s before I first attended an opera. None of my K-12 schools had arts education beyond basic drawing and making some simple pottery that could be a bowl or an ashtray, the perfect all-around Christmas gift for Marlboro-puffing parents. None of my family members were artists. They tended to be accountants or nurses or insurance sellers. They would have seen an arts career as impractical. "That's nice as a hobby but how are you going to make a living?"

Good question.

I digress. I was applying to be an arts administrator in Wyoming. To my surprise, I landed an in-person interview. I drove up to Cheyenne. The staff interviewed me. They were trying to decide if I was someone they could work with. As I had already discovered in the corporate and academic worlds, it was important to be collegial in a small department where people often worked together.

One WAC staffer asked me what made me want to live in Cheyenne. I answered that I didn't want to live in Cheyenne -- I wanted to work at the Arts Council. It seemed like a perfectly logical answer. I didn't know anything about Cheyenne except that it was the capital city and sponsored a big ten-day rodeo every summer. When we moved to Cheyenne, people seemed dismayed that we had moved from Fort Collins, which was a weekend destination for adults and their teen children. Elders went to shop at Sam's Club and the city's mega-mall, eat dinner at one of the cool restaurants. Young adults went to party. And this was before legal pot!

I got the job. I was hired by director Joy Thompson who, by the end of the year, was on her way elsewhere. My first assignment was to drive to the Sundance Institute in Utah to meet with literary types from the region to plan a collaborative literary initiative. Joy told me they needed someone from Wyoming and I was it. So I teamed up with Robert Sheldon of the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) and we drove across Wyoming to Redford's place. A great intro to my colleagues in other states. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Program Director Joe D. Bellamy was there. I met reps from literary organizations like the Aspen Writers Conference and a sampling of writers, including Terry Tempest Williams and Ron Carlson.

I absorbed it all, spoke little. Hiked the mountain and pondered my future. I entered the cliche of "steep learning curve" but was prepared for the challenge. When I went to the office the next week, I was charged with coordinating the initiative for Wyoming. I also was tasked with researching, writing, and editing the WAC's 25th anniversary annual report. A tall order, because I knew nothing about the arts in Wyoming. As the WAC's first full-time staffer for literature I had much to do. I had to show that the investment was worth it.

That introductory year is now a blur. One thing stands out. When the 1992 legislature convened, I began to discover the precariousness of my position. Republican leadership declared war on Democratic Governor Mike Sullivan when he vetoed their latest redistricting plan because it was a clear-cut example of gerrymandering. They retaliated by zeroing out the budgets of all of Sullivan's favorite projects, including the Arts Council. This was a blow. Just when I was figuring out what was going on. I refreshed my resume and waited for the hammer to fall. I alerted my family. At the WAC, we mobilized the arts community and its members flooded legislators with calls and letters -- not sure if we had e-mail at that point. A few Republicans groused in public about what a nuisance artists and arts educators were. That seemed ominous. But the response was paying off.

I began to realize that the arts community in the state was a tight-knit web. Legislators had artist neighbors. Their kids were involved in the school orchestra or drama club. Relatives ran arts groups that brought artists and performers to their small towns. Cutting the arts budget was personal. And personal relationships are crucial to life in a place challenged by long distances and rough landscapes and weather. An important lesson.

This story has a happy ending. The budget was restored in a roundabout way but restored it was. Legislators learned a lesson, a short-term one at that as budget cuts to the arts and arts education were always a threat. I kept the resume updated. I was adding lots of experience as an arts administrator. Still learning, as it turns out. That never changed.

In 1993, the NEA came calling. And I answered.

Part XI: The Way Mike Worked -- The long road to a career as arts administrator

Arts administrator.

Nice alliterative term. Features the noun arts, which we all know is a right-brain function, with administrator, which is decidedly left brain. I always felt that I had some of the left and some of the right. I wasn't artistic, but I did enjoy the arts, as in the kind of art you see at galleries and museums and that which you see on stage in the form of theatre and music. My music tastes were shaped by the '60s and '70s, preferring rock and roll to the classical, what used to be called "longhair music" before there were actual long-haired hippies rocking out to Led Zep. My father loved classical music and played the loud stuff: Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Ravel. 

Dad loved the bagpipes.The only concert he ever took me to was the Black Watch, the military band that used to scare hell out of Native Africans, Afghans, and any other peoples the Brits yearned to subdue. He played bagpipe records too, probably to escape a house filled with squabbling kids and a frazzled wife. I was usually reading. I can still read when it's noisy. All through my childhood, my father played his stereo at night.

While studying creative writing at CSU in the late '80s, I supposed that I would teach if my fiction didn't start bringing in the dough. I was a teaching assistant, teaching freshman comp and eventually, creative writing to the young and restless. Much to my chagrin, I discovered that an M.F.A. in 1990 could land you a teaching job at a community college and maybe as a college adjunct. But I set my aims higher. I applied to colleges and universities all over the U.S. I snagged a couple in-person interviews, too, at the Modern Language Association conference in late December in Chicago. They bore no fruit. Too cold. I didn't stay at the conference hotel right by the waterfront but one that I could afford a few blocks away. 

During the three-day event, I encountered many young people engaged in the job search and, when they had a few minutes, attending some of the pedagogy sessions. I went to a few of those. The one I remember best featured Chicago hard-boiled crime writer Sara Paretsky. I'd read a few of her books and she was fascinating and funny. She talked about the movie being made based on her novels, V.I. Warshawski starring Kathleen Turner. She cracked up the audience when she told how the male director tried to talk Turner into showing a bit more skin as she battled the bad guys. Paretsky wondered then if Hollywood might not be ready for a female private eye. The talk filled me with joy until I again ventured outside into the snow and wind. I'd been living in Colorado for 12 years and knew snow and cold and wind. But there was something evil in the wind that howled off of Lake Michigan. 

In 1991, I was 40 and possibly unemployable. I started thinking that I might have to go back to the corporate world. I was broke and had a family to support. What to do?

That's when I started thinking of life as a working artist. The prospect filled me with dread and by the spring I was up to my cerebral cortex in depression. I'd been depressed before but never like this. I couldn't sleep and couldn't concentrate in class. We took off for a spring break trip to Tucson. I sat in the back seat; Chris and Kevin sat up front.  At one rest stop in New Mexico, I bolted off into the scrub, headed for God-knows-where. Eventually I stopped and returned to the car. Chris and Kevin were concerned. I was just a bundle of angst.

It wasn't much of a spring break. My psyche broke, or was breaking. On our way home, we stopped for the night at a cheap motel in Albuquerque. I was created a few miles away in 1950 after my newlywed parents partied in Old Town and then went back to their cramped apartment and had sex. It was about this time of year, too, mid-March, when the crab apple trees were trying to bloom and snowstorms collided with the Sandias. That was happening right this moment, the mountains squeezing fat snowflakes out of a Pacific Low. In my angst-ridden state, I didn't feel like driving or doing much of anything Elsie but hunkering down to wait out the Apocalypse. We waited through two nights. And on the third day, I arose from my somnambulist state and drove us the 500 miles back to Fort Collins. In this state of anxiety, my heart raced and I imagined scary things that would never come to pass. If one snowflake fell, by God, I was going to park this thing and never get out. But it didn't and I didn't. My wife wondered if I had flipped my lid. My son was confused by Dad"s odd behavior. We got home, eventually.

At this point, my experience with therapy consisted of three talk sessions with a therapist in training at UF Health Services. I was 26 and had just broken up with a long-time girlfriend or she had broken up with me. I was depressed and confused. After walking by the Health Services building a half-dozen times, I went in and asked for an appointment. I met with a guy who may have been younger than me, and we chatted. I quit after three sessions because I started to feel better. Not really -- spring was in full bloom and I found many outdoor things to do including spring break at the beach. Nothing like a little suds and sand and surf to ease a person's psyche or at least preoccupy it.

Back to 1991... A week after the trip to Phoenix, I was in the office of the campus psychiatrist.  A real shrink, not one-in-training. He sized me up pretty quickly and put me on a small dose of Prozac, a mind-altering drug. He warned me that it would take a month or more for me to feel its effects. I asked him about any unwanted side effects. Reduced libido, dry mouth, weight gain. I figured I could live with all of those, for a short time at least.

On a nice spring day, a guy I knew from my Denver church shot down his estranged wife in front of her workplace and then killed himself. The Denver Post article about it said that the killer had been under the care of a psychiatrist and was taking Prozac. Experts quoted in the article debated the pluses and minuses of the drug known generically as Fluoxetine. I read all of it but didn't have to as I knew that Prozac was involved. During our next session, I asked the psychiatrist about dangerous side effects such as murder. He took my question seriously but advised me to be cautious when reading about antidepressants because a lot of misinformation was circulating and the Internet was in its infancy. I stuck with the program and gradually, as spring turned to summer, I began to feel better.

I signed up for the arts education project at the Colorado Council for the Arts (now Colorado Creative Industries). They planned to send me to a small town in eastern Colorado for a semester to teach writing in the mornings and model my writing skills in the afternoon. I'd get paid a stipend and would stay at a teacher's house. I could see my family on weekends.

That summer, I worked on my thesis, taught composition at AIMS Community College in Greeley, and served  as the English Department rep to the CSU Fine Arts Committee.  I learned how to stage events, some of them quite big. I was charged with bringing writers to campus. Over the course of 18 months, I worked with Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Maya Angelou, Linda Hogan, David Lee, Larry Heinemann, and others. It was a thrill to meet some of the writers I had read. As I shepherded them around campus, I had some one-on-one time with them, asked them about their work, tried to get tips to help my own writing.

I brought Etheridge Knight to the Larimer County Jail where he coaxed a group of inmates to try out their poetic voices. Knight had been a jailbird himself, and a heroin addict after being wounded in the Korean War. He spoke from a deep well of experience. I spoke to Heinemann about the voice he used in Paco's Story, winner of the National Book Award. When I picked the novel off of the library shelves, I was hooked by the voice, a dead grunt who addresses a man named just "James" ("This ain't no war story, James") and narrates Paco's tale in a "sad and bitter voice." I took David Lee on a tour of his old dorm which now served as offices for me and my fellow teaching assistants.  It was a thrill listening to the diminutive Brooks reciting the "We Real Cool" poem that's included in almost every 20th century poetry anthology:

All of this took time away from my writing and classes. But it was this experience that led me to my 25-year career as an arts administrator.

You just never know where life will lead you. 

Armistice Day 2018

From Metro News in the U.K.:

As we approach the centenary of the Armistice on November 11, the Imperial War Museum has released a recording of the moment the war ended, patched together using recordings from their collections. The artillery activity it illustrates was recorded on the American front near the River Moselle, one minute before and one minute after the war ended. Read more here

My paternal grandparents, Raymond Shay (Big Danny to his grandkids) and Florence Green (Mudder), were both near the action in the closing days of the war. My grandfather was a cavalry officer with the Iowa National Guard and my grandmother was a nurse serving at Evac Hospital No. 8. Several years ago, I printed Mudder's diary (with commentary) on these pages. Here are her entries from Nov. 9-12:

November 9: The Germans have until Monday 11am, am crazy to know how every thing is going to turn out. Am waiting to go on a candy making party but looks like we won’t go tonight as the officers can’t come, such as life, just full of disappointments.
November 10: Busy as could be today, tomorrow is the day which decides about the war, am so anxious to hear the return.
November 11: Am some happy tonight to think the war is really over. I cannot believe it. Haven’t heard a gun since 11am. Great celebrating everywhere. Can almost hear the city hall in Baltimore ringing, and what a wonderful time for Paris.
November 12: Nothing exciting happened, patients coming in slowly. Took a walk. Our orders came. We go Evac to #15, hope from there to #2.

The U.S.-led Meuse-Argonne offensive was still in process, with nurses at Evac #8 working around the clock. Researcher Dr. Marian Moser Jones of the University of Maryland read Mudder's diary and had this response:

As she notes in her diary, Florence was sent to evacuation Hospital number 8 during the end of the Meuse Argonne Offensive in late October, after stints at Evacuation Hospitals 1 and 4. Evacuation Hospitals were nearer the front than base hospitals. Green served near the front during the final push of the war and was part of a group regularly exposed to large artillery fire and aerial bombardments.

University of Maryland Professor of Surgery Dr. Arthur Shipley served at Evac #8. He wrote about his experiences after the war. Here are some of his observations about evacuation hospitals:

The Evacuation Hospitals were usually up to 10 miles from the front. They were well out of reach of the light artillery but within the range of the "heavies" and, of course, were subject to bombing. The difficult thing was to place them along the lines of communication, and at the same time far enough away from ammunition dumps and rail heads not to invite shelling or bombing. They were plainly marked with big crosses made of different colored stone laid out on clear space, so as to be easily seen from the observation planes and to show up in photographs. If there were buildings in the hospital group, red crosses were often painted on the roofs. This was most important, as wounded men in large numbers could not be moved into dugouts if the hospitals were subjected to much shelling. During the Argonne offensive, we were at the top of our strength. We had about 1000 beds for patients, 410 enlisted personnel, 65 medical officers and 75 nurses.

My grandfather also kept a diary but he wrote only short, officious entries. We do know he was involved in the Meuse-Argonne offensive but lack any details. I can only guess his feelings on Armistice Day. He told stories about his role in the war but none about the final bloody days when U.S. troopers suffered massive casualties. The Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery holds 14,246 headstones for the U.S. casualties of the final 47 days of the war.

I am writing a novel set in post-war Colorado. During my research, I learned a few things. The war set people in motion. An Iowa farm boy and a middle-class Baltimorean ended up in Europe during one of the globe's most savage moments. As the song goes: "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?"

All four of my grandparents moved to Denver in 1919-1920. I always wondered why. That's the theme I explore in my novel. What caused my relatives to slip the bonds of their homes and venture West? The frontier was closed, Frederick Jackson Turner said after the 1890 census revealed that the Wild West was wild no more. Maybe my grandparents didn't see a frontier but they saw something. What was that thing?

The more I read about the war, the better I understand the era and the less I understand humankind. I hope to bring some shape to the shapeless.

Part X: The Way Mike Worked -- The Passing Parade

I can't remember The Retiree's name. He had worked in my division, Information Services, at Denver's Gates Rubber Company, before I arrived on the scene in 1983. He came by occasionally to visit the other old-timers. At 32, I was part of the younger cohort stepping into their shoes as they gradually marched off into the horizon. My parents' generation, the generation that weathered major cataclysms to give birth to many children and kick-start the post-war economy.

Sometimes The Retiree came for lunch at the corporate cafeteria. One afternoon, I came across him in the lobby. He recognized me, invited me to sit in the comfy chair next to him. We watched as the corporate parade passed. The Retiree gestured to a middle-aged guy he used to work with.

"Wanted to buy a sailboat and circumnavigate the globe," The Retiree said.

The guy worked in my department. "Did he do it?"

"What do you think?"

I thought no, he did not.

We chatted some more. He spotted a woman he knew. She walked over to say hi. "Hi," she said.

They exchanged pleasantries. He asked if she was still making fantastic cakes.

"Not as much. Julie moved back home with her two kids. I do a lot of babysitting." She seemed a bit embarrassed. When she went back to work, The Retiree explained.

"She made the cakes for employee birthdays. You had to get there early -- guys stampeded to the break room. Fights broke out to get that last piece of three-layer devil's food cake." He got a faraway look. "I still dream about it."

"That good?"

"Better. Yeah, she was going to open her own bake shop. But she didn't. One thing or another came up." He shrugged.

I sensed a theme developing.

"You know a lot of people," I said. "And their stories."

"People tell their stories all the time. You just have to listen." He paused. "What you pay attention to makes the difference."

Another guy walked by. We called him The Actor. He just played Sweeney Todd for a local theatre and got to murder a bunch of obnoxious people whose meaty parts were made into pies. He was talented and drank a bit.

"I worked with him for a few years," The Retiree said. "He went out to Hollywood for awhile. He probably told you that."

"Not a word."

"He had a few bit parts. Played a dead guy in a soap opera."

"So I work in the graveyard of broken dreams?"

He laughed. "Beware." With that, he took off, probably to take a nap. I went back to work to ponder my future.

The above conversation is fictional. You can probably tell because the exchange rolls so trippingly off the tongue. As if it were a scene from a play or novel. That's something a fiction writer can do when blogging. If I was trying to write, say, a memoir, I would have to let you know that I was reconstructing the dialogue because there was no way I could remember what was said verbatim more than 30 years ago. What I can do is recall the feeling I had when sitting in the lobby with The Retiree. Holy Shit, if I don't watch out, I could end up like this endless retinue of sad sacks going back to work in the rubber mines. On some days, I was already there.

It would be rare to find a kid that says he or she wants to grow up to write paeans to industrial rubber hoses. Yet, there are a surprising number of us who grow up to sing the praises of hoses or cars or computers or paper products. We want to be something else but, as the saying goes, a job, any job, pays the rent. In 1983, I was approaching 33, was married, and tired of living on a prayer. I wanted to land a job that entailed some writing, and that's when I began looking for jobs with big companies. 

At Gates, I did know The Retiree I quote at the beginning of this piece. I knew many of them. I photographed scores of retirement parties, took a lot of employee anniversary shots.  Lots of grip-and-grin shots of a VP  congratulating a union guy who had spent the last 30 years making radiator hoses in the deepest darkest confines of the ancient factory. The cavernous work rooms were loud and covered in carbon black, the ingredient that blackens your hoses and fan belts. It was everywhere -- on the walls and floor and machinery. It was in and on the machines. It was on the employees and their work clothes. When I ate lunch with my female coworkers, they always grabbed extra napkins so they could wipe the carbon black off of the seats less their dresses get streaked black. I followed their example until I noticed that the union guys watched us. We were literally trying to wipe away their presence. I was a writer supposed to know a metaphor when I saw it.

I eventually saw it.

I left the corporate world for academia in 1988. We sold our house that we bought with money from rubber writing. I could walk to work. Now, when I'm in Denver and I drive down South Broadway, I see that corporate HQ now bears a different company logo. Across the street, the massive factory is gone. After Gates abandoned it and it turned into a magnificent ruin, urban explorers made it their playground. Replacing it are rows of modern condo complexes for the new crop of college graduates eager for the Mile High lifestyle. They can catch the light rail at the hub at the corner, where the Gates garage once fixed employee cars at a reduced rate. The company clinic and grocery store are no longer there. "The song "16 Tons" says "I owe my soul to the company store. That wasn't exactly the case, as it was just convenient to shop at the company store. This wasn't Appalachia during the Great Depression. But it was the ending of a certain type of employment. Chris and I paid nothing for an emergency Cesarean and seven days in the hospital for mother and son. All the prenatal and postpartum appointments were free. A billion-dollar privately-owned company in a booming economy could be generous. Every employee's kid got a free gift at the annual Christmas party and rode the Lakeside rides for free at the summer picnic.

It sounds good. But Gates was already building factories in right-to-work states and overseas. The ranks of the URW were beginning to decline. A new health care plan was in the works and a fully-funded retirement plan was being replaced by a 401(K). I know because my department was tasked with explaining the changes to employees who weren't always appreciative when being lied to. The new century approached. Technology would save us all. The international open market would signal a new golden age. Reagan said so.

The first short story I wrote in my CSU M.F.A. writing workshop was called "Who Needs Fedder?" It concerned a young corporate guy who chronicles the travails of his co-worker Fedder when he quits the corporate softball team. He quickly became a non-person, like Doc Daneeka in Catch-22. The story seemed outlandish to my younger classmates. The older ones thought it said a lot about people they had known in the corporate world or in the military. The story was published in 1990 in Bob Greer's High Plains Literary Review in Denver. I never knew what my former Gates colleagues thought about the story as I lost touch over the years. Now they're all retirees like me, reminiscing about those glory days.

You can read "Who Needs Fedder" in my book of stories, The Weight of a Body. It's out of print, but I'll find the file and link it to this post. I will reread it, just to find out what this writer thought of his corporate career.

The library's "The Way We Worked" series features Tuskegee Airman on Nov. 10

The Laramie County Public Library presents another program that's part of "The Way We Worked" exhibit. This family-oriented presentation features one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, a group of Africa-American young men whose job entailed escorting U.S. bombers over Europe and shooting Nazi planes out of the sky. They also had to endure the wrath of hateful fellow Americans, both before, during, and after the war that beat the fascists. 

Franklin J. Macon is the author of I want to be a Pilot: The Making of a Tuskegee Airman. He will talk about it and sign copies of book on Saturday, Nov. 10, 1-3 p.m., in the library's Storytime Room. Here's more info on Macon's presentation:

Franklin J. Macon was one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen and is now 95 years old. Come hear him speak about his incredible journey from a childhood in Colorado Springs, Colo., to the skies over Tuskegee. His amazing life story speaks of overcoming all odds to reach your dreams by never giving up, living an honorable life and keeping close to family (…and maybe being just a bit mischievous). Inspirational for every member of your family, young and old. Book signing of I Want to Be a Pilot: The Making of a Tuskegee Airman will follow the event. The book is written for upper elementary and junior high school students. 

FMI: 307-634-3561

Part IX: The Way We Worked: Things To Do In Denver When You're Alive

Where do you look for work when you're new to Denver?

Ski shop? Sure. Colorado was crazy for skiing in 1978 and it was affordable too. Every Friday, Denverites piled into their big American cars and raced up the hill to big American ski areas such Vail and Breckenridge and Aspen. These skiers needed gear and there were plenty of places to get it. People flocked to the Gart Brothers Sportscastle on South Broadway. You could get anything sports-oriented there. Buy a new tennis racket and try it out on the rooftop tennis court. Test drive golf clubs at the driving range or skis on the ski machine. Gart Brothers always was hiring but preferred sales people with a sports background.

So, instead of working at a castle, Chris worked a few blocks down Broadway at a storefront selling ski equipment from a failed business. Neal, one of my father's Regis College buddies, owned the store. He put her to work, even though she had no ski experience, had lived most of her life in semi-tropical army bases in exotic locales such as Atlanta and Ethiopia. Colorado's Rocky Mountains were new territory as was sizing ski boots for bargain hunters with stinky feet. 

Colorado, then as now, was a place where young people came to mingle with other young people in the great outdoors. Denver, especially, was and is a sports town. My cousins were crazy for the Broncos, a formerly hapless NFL team that had played in its first Super Bowl in January '78. When they weren't cycling or kayaking or hiking or jogging or skiing, Denverites watched the Broncos. 

No surprise, then, that Chris and I both found ourselves in the sports biz. I covered high school sports for The Denver Post. I was part of the crew of correspondents that traveled the state, reporting on the exploits of the Brush Beetdiggers, Fort Collins Lambkins, East High Angels, and Monte Vista Demons (Colorado high schools go way beyond "Bulldogs" when it comes to mascots). Our charge was to chronicle each game, get the score right, and spell correctly the names of the standout athletes. This last one was important. Upset parents usually went right to the sports editor with complaints. He didn't like complaints. Check spellings, he'd say. And spare me the deathless prose -- save that for your novel. The joke was the every reporter had a novel a-brewing in his bottom drawer, right next to the pint of rotgut whiskey.

One night at a staff party at the downtown Holiday Inn, Denver Nuggets General Manager Bob King chatted with Chris and found out that she was looking for a new job. The conversation probably went something like this:

Chris: I work at a ski shop. I don't know anything about skiing.
Bob: What do you know about basketball?
Chris: Nothing
Bob: How would you like to work for the Nuggets?
Chris: When do I start?

Chris worked in the Nuggets front office for two years. She had the use of a pair of season tickets. I couldn't make much use of them because I worked most of the nights that the Nuggets played. My cousins were free on weekends so they went to the games while I watched 5-foot-4 girls play roundball in Evergreen and Colorado Springs. I sometimes filed my stories on ancient fax machines. When those didn't work, I called and dictated my stories from remote locations to meet the 11 p.m. deadline. On other nights, I covered hockey or wrestling or anything else that might sell newspaper subscriptions. I covered racketball, tennis, cycling, baseball, and motocross during my three years at the Post.

Meanwhile, Chris assisted the Nuggets through a winning with future Hall-of-Famers Dan Issel, Charlie Scott and David Thompson. It was a pleasure to watch Issel mix it up with Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Kareem was the superior athlete. But Issel made up for it in sheer grit. Nobody could fly like "Skywalker" Thompson. In a search for other highs, he almost sabotaged a brilliant career with his yen for cocaine.

In 1981, I landed a job as managing editor of a lifestyle weekly called Up the Creek. Chris grew tired of the sports world and switched to banking. Two of my sisters moved to Denver and worked as nurses. The cold got to them and they returned to Florida. Chris and I both entertained thoughts of moving back to Florida. Friends and family lived so far away. Chris's mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1980 and she made many trips back to Daytona. We were young and didn't mind taking cheap red-eye flights out of Denver's Stapleton for weddings and reunions and eventually funerals.

In retirement, we ask ourselves many questions. Looking back, what would I have done differently? There were scores of alternative lives I could have lived. One of a fiction writer's jobs is writing about alternative worlds, lives different from mine.

I still write fiction. Making stuff up satisfies a need in me. While I worked through various jobs, I kept writing. I have journals going back to 1972. I've published one book of short fiction, published a number of stories and essays in magazines and anthologies. I have posted weekly on my blog since 2005. I have written thousands of words, maybe millions. I am sure that I spent the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers said I needed to be an expert in my field. Expertise did not lead to Stephen King-style publishing success. Still, I write. 

I had a number of jobs in the second half of my working life. Two of them managed to consume 30 years in the blink of an eye. I will write about them in upcoming posts. 

Part VIII: The Way Mike Worked -- Saga of a Dying Mall

It's no news that suburban malls are dying. Young people avoid their manufactured atmospheres. Families may go into the multiplex to see a movie but venture no further. Elders, me included, walk circuits of the mall when the snow flies and the wind blows. Heart attack rehab, not shopping, is our goal.

In 1977-78, I worked part-time in a dying Florida mall, a trendsetter when it came to obsolescence. I clerked at a Paperback Booksmith Bookstore. Remember when all malls had bookstores? You had PB, Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, Books A Million, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Our store, owned by a friend of a friend, was located strategically inside the mall's main entrance. Surrounding us were a women's clothing store, a cut-rate department store, a diner, an ice cream emporium, and a shoe store. If you ventured further, you could find the triplex movie theater that still showed first-run films but also midnight shows for stoners, Rocky Horror and Clockwork Orange among them. A karate studio was the lone store along one of the mall's corridors. It could be kind of spooky there at night, although the sensi, a U.S. Marine black belt, never seemed worried.

We all knew each other. How could we not? We were passengers on a sinking ship. Some nights were totally dead. Bored employees wandered the stores, trading gossip and making small bets on which place would close next. Matches happened. I dated one of the staff at the women's clothing store. Two college kids on our staff became an item. Customers sometimes interrupted them as they canoodled behind the counter.

My boss, Dave, was still smarting from his divorce but dated one of the part-time waitresses at the diner. His wife had come out as a lesbian and had moved with her lover to the other end of the state. They shared custody of their two kids. The duo had opened the bookstore in the early 1970s, when the future seemed bright for them and the Sunshine Mall.

We all knew books. I'd say that's a rarity now. It might be true at some of the Barnes & Noble stores still standing. It's usually the indies that have knowledgeable owners who hire knowledgeable staff. At our mall store, we sold a lot of best-sellers, romances, and mysteries. Magazines too. Not much demand for Tolstoy or Proust. My job was to man the register, gather up titles to be shipped back, stock the shelves with new books, and watch out for shoplifters. We stocked some skin mags, but the most-stolen were biker mags such as Easy Rider. The Daytona Beach area obviously was bigger on vroom-vroom than pulchritude.

When we returned paperbacks, we ripped off the covers and mailed them to save postage. We chucked the books. Sometimes I found one I liked and took it home. This was OK as long as I didn't try to sell it. I saved money that way but some bookstore somewhere was missing a five-bucks sale for a Conroy or an Irving. I took some to my family. There was always one of my siblings draped over a couch, reading. Mom and Dad were both big readers. None of them seemed to care that the covers were missing.

I lived with Carl, an old high school acquaintance. He was a mechanic at Ice Cold Auto Air, a very important place in steamy Florida. He fixed auto ACs at work, would roll back your odometer on the side. He offered several times to do mine but I doubted if anything would help my rusty Ford Torino. Carl was what you would call a player today. He dated lots of different women. A good-looking guy with a smooth southern accent, he could talk the talk and dance the dance, which was helpful in the dawn of the disco area. Carl blasted southern rock in his truck cassette player but, well, the chicks were digging KC and the Sunshine Band and the BeeGees and so was he. I sometimes accompanied Carl, figuring I could engage some of the women that gravitated to him like planets circling the sun. I was OK looking, but not much of a dancer and a better writer than conversationalist. I also discovered I could be an opportunist, if given half a chance.

I tired of working two jobs for peanuts and decided to move to a city where opportunities abounded. Choices were Denver, my birthplace and a city where I had family connections, and Atlanta, kind of a shining city of the South for young people. Like most Americans, I thought that the next big thing was just over the horizon. After being under-employed for a year, I was ready for a challenge.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1977, Carl and I hosted a party featuring five bushels of Apalachicola oysters and several kegs. It was a full house. One of Carl's coworkers fell into the half-barrel oyster fire; neither he or the oysters sustained permanent damage. One of our two toilets backed up. Cars overflowed our yard and onto our neighbor's driveway. W hen he came to complain, we invited our middle-aged neighbor to join us in beer-swilling. He graciously declined.

I met my future wife Chris when she arrived with Cathy, one of Carl's women friends. She thought she was a special friend until she discovered that Carl had many other special friends. Cathy tried to pull Chris out of the door and away from the party. But Chris and I had already developed a special friendship that would continue through four decades, all the way into the present. Turns out, she also was planning a move to New Jersey, where she  had lots of relatives, or Atlanta, where she had no relatives but ventured there often with friends. If we had made a Venn Diagram of our choices, ATL would have been the place we had in common. That would be the logical place to go.

So we moved to Denver.

Next: Rocky Mountain High