The Middlewesterner

FROM MORING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 28, 2001

It gets light late;

it gets dark early. Somewhere a switch has been flipped: the flowers hold on for their very last rejoicement; the water will soon shiver itself to crystals. You leave nothing behind; you leave everything behind; sometimes even God is at a loss.

A grey haze overhead, a flupp, flupp lazy flap of flag at the cemetery. It's a flupp flupp kind of morning. The mourning doves lined up on the powerline out in the country all face the grey western horizon. They have nothing, they want nothing; they leave nothing. It's a clean life: you live, you give, you die.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 27, 2001

Fog out the window.

Haze overhead, with blue behind it. Morning, like a speckled bird's egg.

Daughter and son-in-law fly in this afternoon from Montana - another country. M. and I drive to Appleton to pick them up at the airport. They left home for the Missoula airport at 4:00 a.m. The plane comes in at 3:30 p.m. That's a long day flying. Well - flying takes about four or five hours. The rest of it is security.

How much will it cost us to be safe? How will you know you're safe? 99% safety means everyone hundredth person dies. That's not what we want, we seem to want better than that. At what cost?

Fighter jets patrol the skies over NYC and Washington, DC. Where are the fighter jets patrolling the skies over Fairwater?

Visibility in the country is an eighth of a mile. All the grasses are heavy with moisture. A car surprises me coming at me out of the gloom.

Then visibility opens up to a quarter mile, then half a mile and more. The sun makes rainbows of the pillars of fog that remain.

In Ripon there are trees turned bright colors - not whole trees, patches, where the first light of morning touches them. The light burns them orange and red and yellow.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 26, 2001

The birds chatter their celebration

of summer's end and the beginning of autumn. How lovely a morning, they seem to be saying. No dew on the windshield, a light cloud cover overhead; daughter and son-in-law coming home from Montana tomorrow, I should sing in celebration too.

Wind in the flag at the cemetery, from west to east. In the country I can see a swatch of open sky to the west. Is it the hole the wind blows through? In the east the overcast wants to break up over Lake Michigan. To the north, low to the horizon, another blue hole.

A dead pheasant along the way this morning, a dead racoon. A certain darkness. The passing shadows. Four Canadian geese headed to the northwest. The way the grasses bend. Even as I write grasses I hit a sparrow with the car, kill it.

Crows in the rearview mirror, playing tag. Is that what the past is?

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 25, 2001

Blue sky, sun, autumn chill.

Secrets, like letters put back in the shoe box, hidden in the corner of a closet. So soon summer is gone from us. Even memory fails us. Where did it go?

No wind in the flag. Clouds along the big lake to the east again. Shadows of power poles across the asphalt. Lines like bars, the window which reveals our imprisonment.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 24, 2001

We've got some cold, blue sky.

Wind and some rain over the weekend, and a cold front has moved in. The season turns, severely.

In the Middle of the Middle: my middle western book. I shall extend the themes laid out in Curlew:Home across the entire middle west by examining one town in each of the middle western states, an area defined roughly by the extent of the tall grass prairie in the region - from very western Ohio all the way to eastern portions of the plains states - North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. What is home? What are the middle western emblems common across the area? Landscape, environment, people, history - all of these factor into the definition of the middle west. I shall use interview and experience, history and geology, essay and journal entry and meditation. I'll walk, I'll drive, I'll listen, I'll read, I'll listen some more, I'll watch. What is it that makes us who we are, here where we can see a thunderstorm roll in from miles distant? Human and animal, vegetable and mineral - what is it that makes us who we are?

The task: identify one community in each state, then establish how to let it represent the state and the area. Hold each community for examination. What shall I see?

The flag at the cemetery is blowing from north to south at full mast. As if sorrow could be done.

Some part of a field of corn has been chopped for silage.

To the east, clouds pile along the edge of Lake Michigan like a wall of rocks.

Soybeans - they looks as if they are ready to be taken.

Freeze and frost advisories for tonight. 'Tis the season.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 21, 2001

It is a grey day;

trees are a green wall against despair. Today is yesterday's tomorrow. Why are we always surprised? Today is tomorrow's yesterday.

I have a road that takes me where I want to go. The path is clear. I step into it.

Ultimately what else is there to speak of but the weather? The weather is emblem of everything; the weather is moderator of everything; you go nowhere without it; you do not control it; if it displeases you it is your own fault you are unhappy. The weather, she is like a woman, and so my relationship to weather might be a little peculiar.

Now it is raining hard. I can see the trail of the vehicle in front of me marked in the moisture on Highway E. The rain lightens; the rain grows heavy. It looks like orange barrels have been removed from the roadside. Chunks of cloud hang down low, drag. It is a Canadian kind of morning.

By the time I reach Five Corners, the rain has stopped. It looks to be a temporary respite only - there is plenty of greyness for plenty more rain.

It must be homecoming in Ripon - houses have been TP'd here and there. Coaches, players. We don't recognize our little rituals for what they are. Put this in National Geographic and see how strange it looks.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

All roads lead to

Fairwater and the one coming in from the north - Highway E - now has both shoulders graveled and packed and smoothed. That was completed yesterday - so I saw on my way home from work. Except for picking up of the beleaguered orange barrels, the job is done.

The sun comes late these mornings. It is not raining, but it is not particularly cheerful - cloudy with patches of scattered sun.

All roads lead to Fairwater; all roads lead out of town in faraway forever directions. For whom is it home they must hang on to; for whom is it just another place to leave? Why are we one or the other?

Wind from the west. The sun shows itself, the cloud cover burns away. Haze in the distance like the memory of a kiss.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 19, 2001

It has been a very dark,

grey morning. It has been a week of sorrow. Getting angry, seeking revenge, these do not make you one with the Buddha, with the Christ, with Allah. Heavy cloud cover is metaphor for everything this morning.

On Monday I'd said to someone at work that you weren't going to see the war against terrorism on TV. Yesterday, he told me, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that you're not going to see the war against terrorism on TV. And I'm sure that what we don't see won't be anything to make us proud. When you are fighting dirty fighters, I suppose they will think, you fight dirty.

People ask me for an opinion about what to do. I don't know what to do. I cannot keep even my own walk swept clean.

The flag at the cemetery is at half mast again today. It blows northeast to southwest.

In the country, a mist thick enough to look like rain in the distance. Moisture beads on my windshield.

A fellow in an orange truck, in orange coveralls, sets an orange barrel away from the west shoulder of Highway E, down into the ditch there. That would suggest gravel will be packed into place soon, to complete this job. Something comes to resolution.

All the flowers at Five Corners want to close up their blossoms this morning tight like a fist.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 18, 2001

There is fog out there

this morning, thick as our blue funk. It rained yesterday, gently; today everything is lifted and is carried in the air - all that moisture is an underworld to walk through.

I talked yesterday with a fellow I've always thought had an unusual and original turn of mind; now I find out he is just an ordinary cracker, and I'm disappointed. In the past, though he is unschooled, he had an unusual perspective on things. Yesterday he sounded like conservative talk radio turned up a few decibels and down a few IQ points (if that is possible - is that possible?).

The fog closes down the view a quarter mile off in all directions. Trees are eerie sentinels in the ghostliness.

The shoulders to the west side of Highway E have not been graveled.

The corn still standing, most of it must be field corn, yet some of it gives no sign of turning. Either it is very late sweet corn or it holds its secrets close.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 17, 2001

Rain falls gently, like grace

on a good and solemn people. We take everything a little more serious now than we did a week ago. We would be lifted to heaven by 5000 souls, yet the weight of our grief burdens us so. Let the rain come down; let the rain wash us.

It was a bright and lovely weekend, as if we had nothing to be somber about. Yet we were somber.

The raspberry-colored house is now cinnamon, with blue-grey and coral accents. And she looks stately and elegant, the old girl. The work is not done, the crew is not here because of the rain, the day is dark, and still she looks lovely. We have made some good choices. This will house us til death, warmly and well, this good house in Fairwater.

Half the gravel for the shoulders along Highway E between Fairwater and Five Corners was put down on Friday, on the shoulder along the east side of the road. The shoulder to the west side remains to be done.

The absence of the hawk tree is the absence of the World Trade Center towers - a correspondence, now that I've made it, I'll never be able to forget. Sometimes maybe it would be better to close my mind and stop thinking, to stop seeing and thinking. I say that, but I don't think I mean it. There is so much I wish to see, so much I choose. Pleasure and pain are two edges of the same knife.

South of Ripon, a tree has turned orange, a gay dress for the funeral.

It's my job: I write things down, I do not always know what they mean.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 14, 2001

We have some blue sky;

we have some clouds. The day makes promises like every other day, and like every other day it hasn't delivered yet. I have returned to a normal routine today - as if anything can ever be normal again. The ol' mudball spins and wants to fly apart. Only poems and prayers and all those dead firemen joining hands hold it together.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 12, 2001

What a difference

a few hours can make. Yesterday as I drove to work I wrote "what kind of an omen is a slow orange truck?" Today we have an answer. As I was writing "omen" a hi-jacked airliner was plowing into one of the towers at the World Trade Center in New York City, and twenty minutes later another airliner plowed into the other tower. Why don't poets go to war? I know I don't have the stomach for it. It looks like a cheap Japanense science fiction movie - airliner smashing into tall building, building crumbling and leaving dust clouds, thousands of people killed. The background on all the news shows last night was New York City, sometimes the Pentagon, both of which look like war zones.

I have the radio in the car on - I usually don't. The sky overhead is empty. Yesterday as I drove to work I saw the lines of two or three vapor trails.

Siding of most of the west side of our house has been completed - there is some reassurance in that, even as the world around us looks as if it has been overcome with madness.

The empty sky is eerie, unmarked from east to west, a blue smoothness that will never be the same.

The blue smooth-
ness of sky will
never be smooth
again. The world
has cracked like
a seed husk, dry
and a long way
from water,
from hope.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

We have blue sky and sunshine.

We had rain on Friday afternoon, a little more rain on Saturday. The weather has been mild, cool, the air moist. It is autumn coming on.

How much difference in a life a mere two hours makes. Last week Thursday morning I rose about 2:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. I headed in to start work at 3:00 a.m. in the bindery, where help was needed because of a heavy workload. I did the same thing again on Friday. In both cases, I worked no longer than a total of 10.5 or 11 hours, yet my exhaustion far exceeded the bit of extra time. Saturday morning I slept til 8:00 a.m. in spite of my alarm going off again and again. I rose at 2:00 a.m. again on Monday morning, worked til 2:00 p.m.

Partly it is a matter of my age perhaps; I have come to a time in life where routine is a real comfort and any disruption of the routine has more extensive consequences than for a younger man. I think it's a matter of physical resiliency, but I might be making excuses.

Of course I used the disruption as an excuse to abandon these notes for a few days - I didn't leave slack in the changed schedule for writing notes; and, of course, driving to Ripon at 2:30 a.m. doesn't invite elevated thoughts, at least it didn't invite elevated thoughts from me.

It is good to see the morning sun. I have missed several sun rises with the hours I've been keeping.

There is a delicate haze rolling off in all directions, not enough to shroud anything, simply enough to make all the edges indistinct.

What kind of omen is an orange truck? There's a county fellow driving slow in front of me. I have to pass him.

There is a skunk dead on the road north of Five Corners - the air is as bracing as a shot of morning whisky.

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 5, 2001

It is another chime of sky;

it's a blue bell of a morning. Long shadows. A solidness to the sunlight, the color of egg yolk.

I'd lost myself in my work at my desk this morning, missed the 7:00 a.m. mark for getting my shower, so I'm running a few minutes later than I'd like. I was swept up in the pile of work I've got to do to get Curlew:Home out before the public. That's not complaining. When you lose track of time, that's a sign you're enjoying what you are doing.

As I leave for work, M. and I walk a circle around the house. The fellows have the north wall entirely re-sided - cinnamon as the main color, with accents of blue-grey and coral. The house definitely will be warmer against winter; and perhaps the cinnamon is not as bright as the raspberry we've had. I liked the old colors, I like the new. I'm an easy fellow please for a few minutes this morning.

A heavy dew on everything, enough that a fellow could live a day on it.

No wind in the flag.

North of town, the red tail hawk, its body facing Fairwater, its head cocked severely to the east, its beak clearly a mean hook. Its redness accented in today's light, it shines.

Last night I noted the county fellows had painted the stripes on Highway E between Fairwater and Five Corners. Now remains only the grading of the shoulders and the removal of the anxious, abused orange barrels cowering at the road's edge. At this point few of the barrels are undamaged. We have not been kind to them.

IVAN BURGESS'S ECHO ECHO

"If you are looking for the bowling lanes

in this town," Ivan said, "you can't miss it. Got a brand new coat of red paint. It stands out like a peacock in a roomful of wrens."

"Last Wednesday," Ivan said, "you could see the school busses scuttling around like a bunch of water bugs, so you knew that school had started."

"I don't care what anybody says," Ivan said, "girls are built better now than they were when I was in high school. When I was in school the girls all wore middys and blouses and pleated skirts. Some of the girls in school back then reminded you of a town in New England, you know, Shapeless, Massachusetts. And the cheerleaders wore, of all things, culottes, or whatever you called em. They weren't skirts; they were, I don't know, they had legs or something that kept them from swirling up. I like it better now."

"They call running five or ten miles a 'fun' run," Ivan said. "But you know I've never heard any of them laughing out loud."

"Max Dannenberg, Kendall Nichols, and Dick Stroup were classmates at Gaylord High School," Ivan said. "How would you like to be a teacher and walk into a classroom and have that trio staring back at you? You knew something was going to happen. You didn't know what and you didn't know when, but you knew something was going to happen."

"We had a saying at our house when I was growing up," Ivan said, "that said if it rained when the sun was shining it would rain at the same time the next day."

"All that rock up there at the Alco site comes from the Kendall Nichols farm near the overpass east of town," Ivan said. "What's that old saying - if you want to make money farming, you buy it by the acre and sell it by the pound."

"Dick Weltmer hasn't been wearing glasses lately," Ivan reported. "I asked him why. He said they gave him an implant and he don't need glasses. Then he picked up a Sweet & Low package and said, 'I can read the print on that.' I don't know if I believe him or not. I couldn't read the print on the package of Sweet & Low with the Hubble telescope."

"The As the Bladder Fills Club, by unanimous vote, is taking the rain amount as reported by Linton Lull as official," Ivan said. "Thursday morning at 8:15 he reported .68" as the official raindfall amount. We don't care what Bob Levin says."

"Dick Stroup got one of them colonostopees, or what ever you call em," Ivan said. "He said they didn't knock any fillings out of his teeth in the process."

"You know," Ivan said, "they are always talking about what great athletes we have nowadays. Well, let me tell you that we had some great athletes in my day, too. We had athletes who could jump a three-strand barb wire fence with a stolen watermelon under each arm and could outrun the shot-gun pellets on his way out of the watermelon patch."

FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 4, 2001

A fresh morning, blue sky,

dew on the windshield. It's a new month already. Fall must be coming: you can smell the edge of it in the air.

There is bright sun in my eyes as I head up Washington Street; there is a squirrel crossing in front of me, a green walnut in its mouth. No wind in the flag at the cemetery. The blacktopping of Highway E appears to be done. The shoulders still need work but my way is smooth.

Five snow geese flash off and on like lights against a blue background of infinite sky.

Just at the south edge of Ripon a field of soy beans is starting to turn. All things must die. In the end is the beginning.

PRE-PUBLICATION CELEBRATION AT NORTH SHORE BANK WAS A GREAT SUCCESS

On Friday, August 31,

from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., Peter Pizzino and I signed copies of Peter's Story at the North Shore Bank in Fox Point, Wisconsin. Peter has banked at North Shore for forty years, and now that we have the book in hand, the bank offered to host a pre-publication celebration and book signing. And they know how to do it.

From left to right: Carol Bergen of North Shore Bank; Lucio Bonfiglio, who came to the United States from Italy in 1958; Peter Pizzino; and Tom Montag - at North Shore Bank's pre-publication celebration for Peter's Story. Notice the balloons in red, white, and green. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

From left to right, Marshall Dunkleman, Peter Pizzino, and Tom Montag. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

North Shore Bank's motto is "North of Expected," and let me tell you, this was Way North of Expected. Right off, the bank bought two copies of Peter's Story to give away as door prizes. Then on one table there was coffee and a pale pink lemonade the color of blush; on another table, Italian breadsticks with marinara sauce, and pizza - actually a total of three large pizzas, before all was said and done. And a platter of biscotti. In the cooler, containers of Italian ice in various flavors. The place was decorated with green, white, and red balloons, the colors of the Italian flag and the colors on the cover of Peter's book.

The crowd came early and stayed late. Some of them talked in Italian with Peter. Some bought books. Bank employees turned customers our way who didn't quite know what was going on, but they soon got into the spirit. Customers stood with us and talked. Sat with us and talked. Ate pizza and breadsticks with us and talked.

The North Shore Bank employees, Peter Pizzino, Tom Montag, and Peter's Story. Photo by Kate Knox/NSB.

It was a celebration, more than I ever could have expected. And when we wrapped up, all the employees grabbed a copy of Peter's book, and we got a photo for the company newsletter.

Thanks to Aaron, Carol, Kate, and all the other good people at North Shore Bank for making the celebration such a success!