Another Free Library

This morning on my way into the lab on campus, I made a detour to checkout a place I seen on my first day, when I was lost and wandering around looking for my building. I had made note of where it was and so it was not hard to find it---a small house smack in the middle of the campus along a wide sidewalk and out front a quaint free library. This morning, with a little time to kill, I decided to check it out. I retraced my steps on the first from the engineering building northward and found the house easily. It looked like a small two-story frame construction one might see in Portland, with an ample porch and a nice slanted roof. 

Sure enough the little free library was out of front. I approached up the sidewalk carrying the coffee I had purchased at the Memorial Union on my way in. The sign out front of the house, which I had not noticed on the first day, read "Virginia Piper Writing House."

The little free library was much smaller than the one in my park. I turned the latch and opened the glass door. Even through the glass I could see that most of the books looked to be poetry volumes of recent vintage, and by their titles they looked to have the theme of being aligned with current politics, which is basically "anything that isn't written by a white man."

One of the volumes was called "A Postcolonial Love Poem", which looking it up now, apparently won the Pulitzer Prize. No doubt it is a powerful statement against the oppression of indigenous peoples. I read some passages from it. I could understand why it won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet it was not really to my taste. I suppose I am hopelessly "colonial" in that sense. My ancestors were pioneers and settlers, and I am a product of that. I don't feel bad about that. If I were to write a love poem, I suppose it would reflect that. 

After replacing the book and closing the door I walked up onto the porch and peered inside. Evidently this was the campus creative writing center. Tours are available every other Tuesday, at noon. I made a note of the time so I could come back then if it struck me to do so. 

Encounter with a Robot

 Friday afternoon walking back the parking lot of the performing arts center, I cut through the section of campus with the student dorms. Walking down the sidewalk I saw up ahead a robot making its way towards me. It was one of those "cooler on wheels" designed for delivery of food and other things. It was my first time seeing one in the wild.

As it approached me, I stayed on my side of the sidewalk. When it was about ten feet from me on the other side, I waved to it and said "hello there!" On its side was a sticker than said "I deliver to Sun Devils."

Whether it was this greeting with a wave, or my general look, I startled the poor thing, which stopped dead in its tracks as if I had interrupted deep in thought. It slightly backed up as if to look at me and then popped in pace, as if to say, "well, I will be on my way now," and then it proceeded past me with a low whirring noise. 

All in all it was a pleasant encounter. One thing that is pattern in my life is that people are generally friendly to me. Now I can add robots to this list as well.

Free the Library

 Since putting up the sign in the Free Library telling people not to put books inside, because they would be ruined by the nightly sprinklers due to the broken door, I have avoided the park. I am embarrassed I put up that sign, even though it said "city has been notified."

Who the hell am I to tell people not to put books in there? So what if they get ruined by water? Maybe that's ok. Maybe that's not the point of it all. 

I had barely been walking down to Bell Road, and definitely avoiding the box. Today I went back. The door was not repaired. Inside one could see many additional books. The worst damaged had. been removed. I couldn't tell if there was more ater damage on others. One person had thoughtfully wrapped their donation in a plastic bag. It was the autobiography of the current vice president. I loved that someone had cared to do that.

Anywya, I ripped out the signs. I may make new ones with a warning that books may get ruined, but it is not my business to tell people not to put books there. I feel so relieved. I can go back to my joyful checking of the library, and my normal walks. I may intervene to rescue certain books if I deem it necessary to do so., but otherwise I must let things play out as they are meant to do, not as I want.

The Professor is a Freshman

 This was my first week going into my new job on campus at Arizona State in Tempe. I have not spent much time on the campus there and it was a unique and pleasant experience.

I parked in visitor parking on the far side of the performing arts center on the edge of campus. As of this past wicked, the touring show of Wicked was performing on weekends and the truck trailers with the posters on the side were parked in the lot. I parked next to them, feeling like I too am part of the touring cast.

Technically I am on "staff" at ASU. I had not interacted at all with co-workers while getting hired, only by the recruiter firm through which I get paid on contract. It is a very well-paying position. I am supposed to go into the "office" two or three times a week, according to what I was told.

The office is really just a small windowless electronics lab in one of the engineering building. Here a team of staff and students are building a platform that will allows professors and students to create new custom AI-driven applications using the latest and greatest models, such as the one that powers ChatGPT, etc.

It is very cutting edge stuff. I have greatly mixed feelings about this work, as I am convinced we are heading towards an AI apocalypse which are going to destroy the remaining social fabric of western society. I feel like a spy from Team Human sent in to get their secret plans. 

My first couple days I had weird butterflies that reminded me of being a transfer student in 1985 in Salem. I felt both confident yet overwhelmed and confused. 

The Rescuer of Lost Friendships

 Just got off the phone with my friend Tom, whom I mentioned in the previous past. I hadn't spoken to him since 2004. He and his wfie live on Maui now. 

They left Portland four years ago because it was becoming a shithole, especially in his neighborhood, which is called Ladd's Addition. He spoke of the homeless people banging on his doors at night. They still own their house there and are going back to stay there for a month, and then flying to Minnesota for their son's graduation.

Our call lasted well over an hour. I felt over the Moon about it. It was exactly what I needed right now---for an old friend to get in contact with me unexpectedly. We both agreed the world is fucked up and everything is broken now. We both mourned over our inability to contact our mutual friend Adam, who goes through waves of the blues and cuts himself off from the world.  He doesn't return calls ever, said Tom. Tom and Adam used to hang out on a regular basis, but somehow they trailed off and they haven't spoken in years. That's hard for me to imagine, because I think of them as being close. 

Tom said he's going to try to get a hold of Adam. 

"I'll probably just have to go to his door and knock on it," said Tom.

"Dude, you read my mind!" I said.

"I was planning on going up there maybe this summer and going to his house, knocking on the door, and when he opens, hand him a manuscript I've written as I walk past him into the house, saying brusquely, I need your help." 

We reminisced about some of our old professors, and a differential equations class we both almost failed. 

 I suspect Tom and I will be in contact on a regular basis going forward. In fact, I'm going to make sure of it. Friends are a treasure and any friend I have at the moment, or recover, is going to remain my friend for the rest of our lives. No reason that can't happen.

This was one of the greatest days of my life, and twenty-four hours ago I didn't see it coming.

They invited us to come visit them in Maui and stay with them, and I could tell he was serious.

Give me a call

 Today I have been feeling a great deal of sorrow as I try connect to several old friends. In each case, I remember happy days when we shared fellowship and I feel the lack of it in the present moment, and the seeming impossibility of a restoration. In each case, there is an element of my own hand in making that so difficult---political or otherwise.

If you've read my blog, you know this is a constant theme of mine. In many cases it is my own hard-heartedness that has caused this. Since the start of the morning, I have sent out four letters by mail.

Yet something very wonderful has happened today too. I heard from an old friend whom I hadn't heard from in many years. He went to college with me in Salem in the 1980s. I think I last saw in Portland twenty years ago. Maybe I saw him when I lived in Portland. His name is Tom. 

His email to me was brief: 

I was thinking about you the other day. Im not a fan of email and havent done social media in a long long time.

Give me a call (808)xxx-xxxx

Now that's what I call the perfect email.

"Im not a fan of email." Amen to that.

"havent done social media in a long long time" Amen to that as well.

"Give me a call"  I'm beginning to think phone calls will save civilization, because they are one of the few ways to break through the Matrix that is keeping us all apart and mentally ill. 

If you want to be my friend, then a phone call is a requirement, I think. 

The area code told me he lives in Hawaii, perhaps. Turns out he and his wife now live on Maui, only a few miles when where we were staying in December. A shame I didn't know that, but there is always next time. And the phone call will be delicious.

ind

In Bisbee

 We just got home from a long weekend road trip to Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper mining town in southeastern Arizona near the Mexican border. It has now become a rather "bougie" place, as one woman there called this, with renovated hotels and many boutiques. We stayed at a nice restored hotel. 

But there are still many biker bars from the old days of it being rough and tumble. Thankfully it is up at altitude, almost a mile high, and quite cool. We are expecting hot weather down in the Valley this week. Summer is beginning. ugh.d

On the way to Bisbee we went through the Chiricahua Mountains and visited the national monument there. A wonderful place.

Jessica is already planning our next road trip. 

Placemaxxing

I changed the title of my new substack to Placemaxxing. I didn't really like the old one, but I needed something for the moment or else I would just keep stalling. I like this one better at least. URL is the same.

My New Blog: The Community Curmudgeon

 The Community Curmudgeon

Disgruntled reflections on the state of American communities in the dystopian 21st Century

Link : https://theironwood.substack.com/

I intend to continue to continue to use this blog here for personal reflections. The new one is intended for a wider public audience. I plan to post there at least once a week.

Legal Business in Seattle

 Yesterday morning I found myself sending an email to a pair of attorneys at a trial law firm in a suburb of Seattle. I marked it as personal and in the subject line I said that I was looking for information on a former senior partner in the firm, in his eighties and now retired.

I had found him online as a part of search regarding my parents and our family history. It had never occurred to me to look for him in a search before, which struck me as odd. As I waited for the results to come, I hoped not to see an obituary, and I was gratified that I did not. Instead I found the still existing page at the aforementioned trial law firm. There was no contact information on the site other than the phone number of the firm, and the email addresses of the two remaining partners, one whom apparently being senior, as his name was tacked on those of the firm itself, which still retained that of the retired gentleman I mentioned, in the way such firms do in order to retain continuity. Indeed there was no evidence of anyone bearing the first name of the firm. Such are the lineages preserved in such titles.

Knowing that I was contacting attorneys on personal business, I made my email short and sweet, stating that I was looking to contact their former partner. I clarified that I was looking for Don M----s, who had gone to Iowa State in the mid 1960s. He and his wife Judy were dear friends of my late parents, David and Maureen Trump, when all of them lived in married student housing. 

I said that my parents always spoke so highly of Don and Judy* (whose obituary I had found, alas). I asked if possible if they would forward my email to Mr. M----s, and that I would be grateful for any assistance.

I wondered if I'd hear back. In the afternoon my phone buzzed with the notification from apparently the senior of the two lawyers, the one whose last name was now at the end of the firm's name. He told me Mr. M----s was still alive. He said he would be glad to forward my email to him. He expressed condolences for the death of my parents. It was exactly what I hoped for.

I hope to hear from him, even a brief message. I can hardly wait to tell my sister Kate, as I think she would love to hear whatever he might say.

Also one more note. I have to find my baptismal certificate from early November 1964, signed by the rector of St. John's-by-the-Campus in Ames. It is somewhere in my possessions in the garage. It would confirm what I am almost certain of, namely that Mr. M-----s is my godfather (and his late wife was my godmother).

*This is the Judy I was thinking of in this previous post. Turns out she's alive! There are so many people with the name and close and ages. You can find false obituaries for lots of people.

The Perfect Spring Day

 I started my new job today. It's hybrid, and I will commute to downtown Scottsdale as part of it. I will not be working for a start-up, nor a large company. Instead I will be on staff at Arizona State University. It looks to be a good job.  My boss seems very chill, the way a university staff boss would be. I was hired after one half hour interview. The looks to be something I will be able to do quite well with no problem. It is about double my previous salary. 

It feels like the clouds are breaking. Also I mailed a postcard to an old friend, whom I haven't corresponded with in a long time. I was a little nervous sending it because we haven't always been on good speaking terms, but maybe we can be friends again. I am hopeful that we can. I hope my friend is joyful upon receiving it. 

And I stared a new blog. It won't replace this one. I will keep writing here. It is a new phase in my creative expression.

The temperature is perfect. No complaints at all.

Work, creativity, and fellowship. What more could a man ask for on a nice day like this?

Birdsong on St. Patrick's Day

 Monday. Finishing the last of my morning coffee before it grows cold, and lost in my thoughts and the space heater next to me pulses out the warm air that it is increasingly unnecessary at this point of spring, but which I retain the usage of, the way a man stubbornly stays in bed on a chilly morning.

My thoughts turn to my writing project, on which I got stuck again. My mind stumbles upon the solution, that might break the ice jam at last. It depends on help from an old friend. But that is a good thing after all? Dependency on others frightens me as it takes things partially out of my control. Yet this is exactly the reason it is good for me perhaps.

As my mind comes to a pause, I notice through the blinds that the sky has turned a pale grey blue in the east. Moreover, and more significantly I hear the solitary chirping of a bird outside, probably in the tree outside my window. It sings in bursts of notes, each  maybe five seconds long. 

I listen to the rhythm and pitch to discern repeated patterns. As I do, I imagine I am listening to one side of phone conversation, except through some filter where the phonemes have been transformed into pure notes. I imagine I can almost hear the words through this filter as the person speaking narrates their day to the other party.

 My paternal grandfather, who was a high school biology teacher in my hometown in Iowa, would surely be able to tell me the name of this bird, or at least make a good guess. I possess no such bird knowledge and could only start naming birds I know which exist here in the Sonoran desert, of which there are more species here than anywhere else in the United States. The desert here is not barren, only dry. The heat, in fact, makes it a dry jungle.

Garage Tidying Secret

 I found this principle applies: the first day can seem hopeless. Unless one is actually carting large amounts to the trash immediately, one feels like one is just moving things around with no progress.

One must be patient. Half way through the second day, it can suddenly feel like one has made great progress in tidying up.

This principle works for any messy, cluttered space.

Thoughts in a Garage During the Rain

 Yes it is finally raining. The rain started when I was in the garage and it was glorious to hear the water on the pavement just outside the open door. I didn't want to leave the garage With any luck it will rain all night.

I was down in the garage specifically to look for an old 1099 tax form in order to verify that I once worked a job in 2019-2020.  I used to work down there in garage during Covid just to have my own makeshift office outside the apartment. I felt lucky that we had that, and also that I had my full unspoiled undeveloped desert to roam on. 

That job was for building an app in a boutique ski hotel in Breckenridge---all remote of course.  It was a great job and it paid very well. Then it closed when Covid came along and they stiffed for a months work---sixteen grand. I don't think about that very much, but it made me lose a lot of trust in people in business. Live and learn. It seems like another world.

I got that job through an old business associate in the late summer of 2019. Jessica and I purposely detoured through Breckenridge and stayed the night there on our way to Estes Park that year, becausee I had already been discussing the position with the old coworker I mention, who had become the director of engineering there. 

Alas I had the stupidity to pack one of my Trump baseball caps---not the classic red MAGA het but a taste green and brown camo hat with gold lettering say Trump 45.  The issue was that I was wearing it absentmindedly at our cabin at the YMCA camp when my sisters drove up to greet us after we arrived. There was no issue at the time, but later during dinner my younger sister, prompted by an attempt at h humor with her, exploded with rage at me. How dare I! She had known I had voted for him, and was planning to do so again, but my wearing of the hat was crossing an unspoken line of truce which I had not been aware of.

She hasn't really spoken to me since, except to exchange pleasantries, at say my nieces high school graduation two years ago. She had been cold on and off to me in the past, but this is the longest by far. At this point I don't really expect to have a conversation with her again in our lifetimes. 

Meanwhile I think I am ready to abandon and foreswear all of my political stances on candidates if it means I can have my family and friends back. It's not that I don't care, or have changed my mind about my underlying values. It's that I feel like I have run my race as far as politics go. I've been doing this a long, long time in my life. I want to retire from it. I will let others hash it out. The world can go on without me. I am not needed. Maybe I will stop voting too, so I can tell my family and friends that I don't vote and will not discuss politics. Crazy, I know, but that's where I'm at. 

My sister's issues with me go deeper than politics---at least I assume so---so I don't think that will work with her. But maybe with some other friends it will work and that will be worth it to me, to at least see them again.

The Spiritual Crisis

 Just got done doing a 90 minute podcast interview with Jesse Hal, a Canadian podcast who reached out to me a couple months back with an invitation to interview me for his show "The Missing Link".  It's the second one I've done with him since the first of year. We spoke about the crisis in our society of people broken apart from each other. I spoke about the difficulties I have with friends and families.

https://www.youtube.com/live/8jzxZUIdTAk

He basically convinced me to take action in regard to reaching out to people with whom I am estranged without fear of rebuke.  I told him I've been holding off doing that..

We have so little time on earth, and to wait for more years to go by is just not acceptable. Better to take the risk now. Besides, as I said, I am the one keeping them away, because of what I imagine they would say to me.

Eclipse Contentment

 This morning a clear almost-full moon out the window in the darkness. Tonight will be a total lunar eclipse. Peaks at midnight. But I will probably be asleep, unless I wake up. 

Just as well. Chance of rain today is one hundred percent. Strong wind advisory. I plan to sit on the porch and listen to the sound of it as long as I can.

Smudge Moon

 Woke up pre-dawn to a smudged moon in the western day. Behind the remnants of last night's rain clouds it looked an oil pastel of a white spot, smeared with a thumb. I had not seen the moon in a weeks and it was nice to see it still exists in the sky

Places we lived (1967-1978)

All places are in Ames except number 8. Number 1 and 2 not listed for the moment. All the structures listed here are still extant as residences as of 2025. 

I don't feel bad that we moved so much. A couple days ago I tried to make a list of why we left various places, but it is incomplete. Everything from number 6 (803 13th street) onward is clear, but 3, 4, and 5  are vague or unknown. In some cases it may have been some kind of dispute with our landlord, financial or otherwise. 

Moving was just something we did often. I thought of it as normal. We'd box up our things and carry them to a new place. Many things would get thrown out each time, so among other things, it was a way of keeping our possessions pared down.

I didn't like leaving friends behind, but I usually didn't mind being the new kid in school (four different elementary schools) because I was always the smartest kid in class. Being the smartest kid meant other smart kids wanted to be my friend. I never had a problem making new friends.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of moving so often is that it supercharged my ability to track memories. So long as I know where a certain memory happened, I can usually place it in time as well, at least within a given year. My sister and I do this. "We were living in (fill in the blank)"

3. 2304 Ferndale Av. (1967-1968) Duplex. Earliest memories of a place. Earliest memory of a dream. Kate was born while we lived there.

4. 2228 Melrose Av. (1968-1970) Duplex. Learned to read and to ride a bike. 

5. 627 6th Street (1970). Duplex. An old house in the old part of town, one block from Downtown. I started kindergarten at Roosevelt Elementary.

6. 803 13th Street (1970-Aug 1971). Duplex. Anne was born while we lived there.

7. A-1 Eastwood Apartments, E. 7th Street (Aug 1971 to early 1972) A rent-controlled complex where we moved after Anne was born. I got my own room. I started first grade there.

8. 907 Fargo Av, Spirit Lake. Old free-standing house. (early 1972 to early 1973).We left Ames for a year because my father got a job in the little town of Spirit Lake in northwest Iowa.  I finished first grade and started second grade there. 

9. 925 Garfield Ave (early 1973 to late 1973). Duplex. We moved back to Ames. I finished 2nd grade and went to 3rd there at Sawyer Elementary.

10. 151-A University Village. (1974) Married student housing. My dad went back to ISU to finish his degree so we were eligible for married student housing for the first time since 1967.

11. 161-A University Village (1974 to summer 1975). We located to a nearby unit because of issues with our neighbors. Just a hundred feet away from previous unit but a much better experience. 

12. 1104 28th Street (summer 1975 to August 1978). Duplex. Dad graduated ISU at last and we left married student housing for good. It was right in back of the Mall, which felt like an amusement park to us. We stayed there three years, which seemed like forever. I went to fifth and sixth grade at Northwood Elementary, and also 7th Grade at Welch Junior High. 

The Passing of Eras

 As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs our grandparents favored, after all, even though we never danced to them ourselves. At festive holidays, the recipes we pull from the drawer are routinely decades old, and in some cases even written in the hand of a relative long since dead. And the objects in our homes? The oriental coffee tables and well-worn desks that have been handed down from generation to generation? Despite being “out of fashion,” not only do they add beauty to our daily lives, they lend material credibility to our presumption that the passing of an era will be glacial.  

But under certain circumstances, ..., this process can occur in the comparative blink of an eye. Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress—any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades.  

-- Amor Towles. A Gentleman in Moscow (p. 144).

The Sixties

 

The 1960s were a time of great social upheaval and change, in some ways more rapid and dramatic than anytime in history, in part due to technology. Yet almost paradoxically, for most people at the time, that change was happening "out there" in the wider world, in the currents of politics and the interactions of nations and civilizations. For most people, especially living in a small town in the Midwest, daily life at the end of the 1960s was much the same as it was ten years before. The high-visibility changes of the 1960s that one saw on the television news, that upended our culture in a seemingly chaotic way, would not impact most people's daily lives until the decades afterwards. 

It's strange for me to imagine that in 1968, which was so turbulent and chaotic on a national level in the media, I was still only vaguely aware of those things going on. Martin Luther King was assassinated not long after the above photo was taken. My father adored King and had gone to see him speak at the Iowa State Memorial Union when he visited Ames. He was a very passionate advocate of "civil rights." King's death would have been something that hit him very hard. Yet I have not the slightest traction of a conscious memory of any of that. Likewise my mother practically worshipped the Kennedys. I can only imagine her sadness when Bobbie was killed only a few months later.

I say all of the above with the conscious awareness that we are now living in a time when the passions of politics are greater now than they were even in 1968. The changes that happening in civilization may be ones that dwarf the ones of that era. 

I felt this most strongly during the pandemic in 2020. Walking to the grocery store, only a few hundred feet away from our front door, and seeing the quiet parking lot, I thought to myself, "this feels like 1968."  I couldn't quite explain it even to myself, but it was partly because life had become simplified and the world contracted again. My life back then consisted of home, grandma's house, the store, church, Downtown, the bank, the clinic, the park, and a few other places. 

Now we are living in the time after that disruption, and so much, especially technology, is now accelerating beyond anyone's ability to keep up. Every week is a revolution. The biggest change is that there is little barrier between our daily lives and the wider world of the culture anymore. Increasingly the firewalls have been breached and we are pulled along with great currents without the buffer of a time to adjust.  Keeping this in mind is one of the things that keeps me sane lately. 

I understand why people are losing their minds. I understand why they are so angry. The world familiar to many seems to be disintegrating and there is little we can do about it. In this ravaged time, I find refuge in the personal relationships I still have. My impulse is to reach out and buttress the connections I still have, like lashing ourselves together on a life raft in a storm lest we be swept overboard. 

Kate, Age Approximately Six Months

 

My sister sent me this by text over the weekend. Much to my relief, she long ago appointed herself the family archivist, with me holding a smaller auxiliary collection. I suspect this photo of her in the snow outside our house on Ferndale was taken in early 1968 by our grandfather Trump, who seemed to always have a camera, and who took the family photos.

Frost: A Time to Talk

Just found this after writing that last entry, while perusing the collection of Frost I rescued from the little free library in the park.

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.