Stuff Envy

This spring we got involved in a book discussion small group that met most Thursday evenings.  This past week the small group had its end of season meal together.  We first drove four miles to the house of the people who hosted the small group, and rode with them to the house of the people hosting the meal, about 25 miles east and a bit north, in a remote area of Clinton County.  On the drive, I saw a fawn nursing, a couple other does and fawns, and a pair of sandhill cranes with a pair of chicks.  We rode in a $50,000 Suburban.  The couple is in their early 60s.  Dan is a dentist, and does a lot of dental mission work.  Chris was a school teacher.  They go on vacations to Costa Rica, Cancun, and just got back from an eleven day cruise along the north coast of the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Yugoslavia.  Dan has 40 acres up north that he maintains and grooms for deer hunting.  He goes out west regularly to hunt.  On the two-story wall of their living room above the fireplace is a big elk head and antlers.  In his garage are numerous mule deer racks and other mounts.  I'd estimate the value of their primary home and property at $700,000 or more.  On the way to the meal, we picked up the widow from our group, also in her early 60s.  She lives in a large home with a three stall garage.  Given her house, lot, and neighborhood, I'd value her property above $250,000. The house we went to for the meal is another large and elegant house, on twenty acres.  The value of that is well above $500,000.  He is an engineer, about retired, and she has taught public school for twenty some years.  They have gone on numerous cruises too, and just got back from a weekend at Gatlinburg to a gospel music festival.  Another couple in our group both have full-time jobs, one as an engineer the other has worked secretarial work at one place for almost 40 years.  They have one of those $40,000 pick-up trucks and a large fifth wheel, and take long vacations around the country.  They too have gone on cruises around the Mediterranean.  The final couple are recent retirees.  I am guessing he is 62, she is late 50s.  He worked electrical engineering in relation to methane gas from landfills.  She was a paraprofessional at the local schools.  They have 20 acres and a cabin on Drummond Island where they go often.  All the couples had gone to the local schools years ago, and have lived in the same area for 40 years or more, actually 60 years (since they were born). It was a bit of a depressing evening.  My wife Beth and I both got depressed or envious or jealous or something.

Four years ago I was lured to what looked like a very good job move.  In hindsight, it was a financial disaster, although it was good in other respects.  The housing market began its nose-dive as we moved.  The house we moved out of lost over 25% in equity, about $50,000.  The house we bought in the higher cost housing market we moved to cost $100,000 more than we sold our previous home for.  Two and a half years into the new job, the company announced that they were cutting my position, sending me packing after begging me to come.  We depleted our savings after finding another job and having to pay our own moving expenses, plus all the expenses that go with buying another house.  For eleven months we had been paying two mortgages and utilities on two homes, putting out 70% of my monthly take-home income in housing.  When that house from our most previous location sold, we lost just over 20% in equity, another $55,000.  The home we currently live in we purchased for $40,000 less than we sold our most previous home.  So where as four years ago we owed 20% of the value of our home (and had 80%, about $150,000, in equity), now we owe just under 80% of the value of our home (and have only 20%, about $30,000, in equity).  In other words, we have lost about $120,000 of equity in four years.  Beth has a 2009 Honda Civic, a great car, with about 38,000 miles.  I usually ride a bicycle to work.  But when I have to drive I have a 1995 Dodge Grand Caravan.  It has only about 150,000 miles.  The dashboard gauges don’t work, so I don’t get readouts on speed, engine temperature, oil pressure, or fuel.  It would cost about $1000 to repair.  I keep a sheet of paper and write down my estimate of how many miles I drive, and how many gallons of gas I put in it.  I estimate fuel usage, and so far have kept from running out of gas.  Beth has a GPS (purchased at a pawn shop), and if I need to take a trip more than ten miles or on the highway, I use the GPS to give me my speed and set the cruise control when I get up to speed.  We rarely go out to eat or buy take-out, maybe once or twice a month.  We do not buy prepared foods, but cook from scratch.  We are trying to live as frugally as we can, given our income and expenses.  We don’t have vacation plans, except to take time off from work and do things that cost only gas money (free parks, lakes, rivers, window shopping, and so on).  We don't buy books or rent DVDs, but use the public library collection.  Three months ago I got a slightly beat up canoe for free.  When I go fishing, I don’t practice “catch and release.”  A couple hours fishing can be a meal or two for us.  When we ride our bicycles, we pick up cans and bottles for the ten cent deposits.  Beth is a very frugal grocery shopper, looking for sales, using coupons, and organizing her shopping route for efficiency of fuel costs.

The other members of our book discussion small group have lots of money and stuff.  Lots of things and lots of places visited.  On the drive back from the meal, we saw dozens of deer in the fields while the one couple was telling us all about their Mediterranean cruise.  Then they asked us “and so where are you going this summer?  What are your vacation plans?”  I felt like saying “sitting in our back yard watching our grass and garden grow.  Maybe too we will take the old bent canoe I got for free out for cruises on Muskrat Lake, maybe a few trips down the Looking Glass River.  Oh, and we will take a trip to Minnesota to visit our children and help them move out of our house that is finally selling, for which we will still owe $7000 at closing.”  They don’t mean to make us envious, and they are genuine and plain folk, not snooty about their wealth, and are generous with numerous charities.  I have known folks who are not at all humble about all their great possessions and how, all by their own efforts, they have come to possess them.  The folks in the book discussion group are not like that at all.  In fact, before seeing their properties I had no expectation that they were the Gotbucks.  I was quite surprised when I saw their properties.  But the feelings of envy arise anyway.

I get over it quickly.  I have so much to be grateful for.  My 26 and 24 year old children, Kevin and Jayne got through college without great expense, and with almost no loans to pay off.  They both got a very good high school and college education, which can take them far.  They both are mature, positive, and responsible.  I am grateful for Beth, for all she has done for me and meant to me.  I am grateful for a good job, one that pays me enough and the work is meaningful.  I am grateful that I make enough that Beth doesn’t have to work, that we can be well-content without double incomes, and that my job is only 40 hours a week so I can spend time with Beth and doing things I enjoy.  I am grateful for our house, the nicest house we have lived in.  I like our location, living the closest to our parents and siblings since 1980.  Every morning when I head out on my bicycle to work, almost the first prayer in my head as I ride off is gratitude to God for the nice bikes I have, for the health and fitness and skills to ride my bike to work.  I am thankful for the church community we found here.  I am thankful for our book discussion small group.  I am thankful for the banged up canoe I got so I can cruise Muskrat Lake and float the Looking Glass River.  I know that, in terms of quality of water, food, healthcare, disposable income, opportunities for leisure and recreation, education, safety, and all sorts of other measures, I have it better than 99% of the people in the world.  It sounds like I am trying to convince myself.

A proverb (30.7-9) asks:
Two things I ask of you, LORD;
   do not refuse me before I die:
Keep falsehood and lies far from me;
   give me neither poverty nor riches,
   but give me only my daily bread.
Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you
   and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal,
   and so dishonor the name of my God.

I heard someone read the line "give me only my daily bread" in a translation that said "give me only enough."  I liked that.  I have enough.  Sometimes, however, that doesn't keep me from stuff envy.

Twice Baptized

Like my dad, whose namesake I am, I have been baptized twice.  Sort of.  Like everything similar, it is different.  I am, after all, a unique individual, just like everyone else.

My dad’s mom, whom I never met because she died of breast cancer at least two years before I was born, was a Calhoun, Irish or Ulster Scots, whichever it is not preventing me from feeling like I can legitimately celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, claiming to be one-quarter Irish.  To say I celebrate it is a bit of an overstatement.  I wear a little green, or greenish, clothing, which looks good with my skin and hair color which, before I grayed, was auburn, while when I grew beards in my twenties and thirties they were red.  That is the complete extent of my celebration of St. Padraig’s day.  So I say Irish, not Ulster Scots.  Only my one sister, on whose third birthday I was born, thinks it important to distinguish the Irish from Ulster Scots because her husband thinks he is very Scots and thinks he knows the specific clan Tartan and Crest, although I always took his comments as puffery to make his heritage sound like it was worth something.  She, my dad’s mom, was a Free Methodist, which my sister, for all I can imagine, probably disputes saying she was a Wesleyan or Nazarene, as if anyone except a Free Methodist, Wesleyan, or Nazarene knows, or for that matter, cares about the difference.  Since she, my dad’s mom, died before I was born, I never knew her, even to the point of not knowing her first name, which I barely recall having heard as Leonore or Lenore or Lenora.  The pencil pushers at Ellis Island said my dad’s mom’s ancestors were Irish, so I am sticking to the one-quarter Irish position.

My dad’s dad, whom I knew pretty well as my only grandpa, because my mom’s dad died when she was only four or five years old, was a German Catholic, Carl, and took seriously his Catholicism.  At least it seemed so to me.  In his red four-door 1961 Mercury Comet with fins on the back, hanging from the mirror was a St. Christopher medal, not that it provided fool-proof protection.  Five or seven years after my dad and mom got married, my dad’s widowed dad married my mom’s widowed mother, making my parents in some sense step-brother and step-sister, but beyond the age when people would have been able to worry about weird and kinky things going on between them.  Not that weird and kinky things weren’t going on between them, but since they were half a dozen years into their marriage together, which at the present moment has continued well for over sixty years, one should permit some weird and kinky things.  My oldest sister was riding in the Comet between my grandpa, my dad’s dad, and my grandma, my mom’s mother, who were legally husband and wife then past their tenth year anniversary at least, when they got in an accident well before the days that pre-schoolers through adults were drilled with the “buckle-up for safety” line, not that the seat belts were all that well designed in 1961 Mercury Comets.  This was also well before the days of padded dashboards, the 1961 Comet sporting a steel dashboard where, at the sudden impact of the accident, my sister did a dental impression and lost her front teeth.  Everyone in our family got to see the dental impression on the dashboard numerous times, for the Comet became our field car.  The car was totaled out, but drivable.  My dad took his acetylene torch and cut the body off the car from the front widow, doors and roof backward, leaving on only the front bumper, hood, front fenders, front seat, frame and floor pan.  He also made and installed a roll bar, just in case.  But since we didn’t wear seatbelts driving the car around the fields, I am not sure what protection the roll bar would have given us.  We drove that car around fields, down the road when we thought we could get away with it, not from the police but our parents, and in the winter pulled saucers and sleds behind it.  With the body gone and no back seat, it also served as a kind of pick-up truck, to haul buckets of dirt or other stuff around our property, including buckets full of poo goo when one year we bailed out our own septic tank.

As a devout Catholic, in spite of whatever protests, if any, Leonore or Lenore or Lenora might have had, and given stories I have heard about her I suspect she did not protest, Carl had Eric baptized in the Church.  After that, by mutual agreement between Carl and Leonore or Lenore or Lenora, Eric was permitted, in twenty-first century language, to pursue whatever religion or non-religion he chose.  Eric was the youngest of three children, a brother seven years older, and a sister, my Aunt Joyce, by all accounts the favorite Aunt of all my brothers and sisters and mine, ten years older.  Growing up, Eric served his time as an altar boy.  During several summers, his dad would ship his sister and him out of the city up north fifty miles to an uncle’s farm in a German Catholic community to work for the summer milking cows, taking care of the chickens, haying, and finding a little time to play but a lot of time to enjoy their aunt’s cookies.  The brother seven years older than Eric was too weak or lazy or whiny, more likely all three, to be any use up there except to play malicious childhood tricks on.  Well, I am not sure you can call it malicious if it is deserved.  The victim, and maybe it is not a victim if it is deserved, probably thought it malicious and undeserved.  But any impartial bystander would have sided with Eric and Joyce.  To this day that middle child is still a bit of a whiner.  Our family did not spend a lot of time with his family, who lived twenty miles from us, yet we visited my Aunt Joyce, who lived one-hundred eighty miles away, a handful of times each year and she would bring her brood to visit us a couple of times a year.  The middle child even to this day has a voice that I can’t call anything but whiny, a bit nasally and whiny, like the muted trumpet that voices the teacher in Charlie Brown television shows.  Mwroonk mwroonk mwroonk.

My mom, Mildred not Millie, was raised, with a sister and two brothers, in poverty by a widowed single mom, Clara, who cleaned houses of the better off for a living, and insisted on training her children to go to the local mission church consistently and to learn not only to read their Bible, or the Bible since there was not more than one in the house, but also to treasure what they read in the Bible.  In other words, Mildred grew up in a devout and pious Protestant home.  When Mildred was fifteen, her friend had set her up on a blind date to go roller skating at Ramona Gardens.  When Eric showed up, handsome, athletic, and, although German, looking all the part of an Italian movie star, Mildred thought he was the one set-up for her.  She introduced herself, paired up and headed off to go roller skating, leaving whoever it was she was supposed to have gotten pared with to mwroonk, mwroonk, mwroonk, or at least that is how I imagine it.  After a year of courtship, not all of it smooth, rather more like a preparation for a long life together where one has to deal with adversity, disagreements, and disputes, they decided to get married.  Two years into the marriage the first child came along, the one that was to bite the steel dashboard of the 1961 red four door Mercury Comet with fins on the back.

By the time the second or third child was born, both of whom came in rapid succession, the second one eleven months and twelve days after the first, and the third a year and eighteen days after the second, Mildred determined it her duty to begin attending a local Baptist church, Alpine Baptist Church where she and her children could be taught to be good Christian people.  The story passed along the family is that Mildred told Eric she was going and taking the kids to church, that he was welcome to come along, and that if he didn’t want to she was going anyways.  Mildred can be a bit of a take-charge sort of person, even one who has a short temper and is not going to keep her feelings bottled up, sometimes a bit blunt, which she regards as just being honest and matter-of-fact.  She has had good mental health over the years in part because of all that.  But she has also on occasion dug herself some relationship holes that required a few years and much forgiveness to fill back in.  She probably knew in the back of her mind that, given the devotion and commitment that Eric and Mildred had for each other, and their joint, deep commitment to the good of their family, he would join her, if not immediately, in going to church together.  It didn’t happen right away.  Mildred learned that the church had a softball team, and Eric was a skilled ball player.  Eric heard about the team and wanted to play, but a condition of playing was that he had to attend church.  So in part due to his devotion to Mildred and to his family, in part to his passion to play ball, Eric began to attend the Baptist church, initially more so that he could play ball.  Both the Sunday preaching and the Thursday night kindness and camaraderie of his softball team mates led Eric to make a commitment to be a daily devotee of Jesus, or as they say in the Baptist church, to ask Jesus into his heart.

Eric’s commitment to Jesus took place in the summer before my birth.  The Baptists took this as his first commitment, not one renewed from his youth and all the days his father and uncles took him to church or his catechism and confirmation or his days as an altar boy, together with Leonore or Lenore or Lenora’s Freely Methodizing him.  Whatever it was, only Eric and God know for sure.  As is, or used to be at least, the wont of Baptists, once a person makes that commitment, they are urged soon, as adult or in some other way accountable believers, to get Baptized as a sign of allegiance to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, and as a sign of the washing away of the guilt and consequence of being born a sinner living a life opposed to God, but now, with allegiance to Jesus, or maybe better put Jesus’ allegiance to you, you are no longer a sinner living a life opposed to God.  You are still a sinner, just not living in opposition to God.  Mildred had never been baptized.  So the two of them decided that, at the church’s next baptismal service, they would both get baptized.  The next service was on a cool late October Sunday.  The water heater at the church wasn’t working, so the water in the baptismal font—for those unfamiliar with full immersion Baptists, a Baptist baptismal font is about the size of a two or four person hot tub, only deeper, with the water coming up to about rib height and nowhere near as warm—was below room temperature, not even 60 degrees.  When my dad and mom stepped down into the cool waters, with me in her ready to be born about six weeks later, she let out a gasp that was heard throughout the congregation, bringing a few snickers and requiring a brief explanation from the pastor.  Even though I was there at my first baptism, I experienced none of it.  Eric and Mildred were baptized, Eric for the second time and Mildred for the first.

My second baptism came just over eight years later in January of 1966.  We had a 1965 Chevrolet Suburban.  Back then they were not the luxury vehicles they are today.  At that time, they were mostly a pick-up truck with the rear window moved to the back tailgate, a body enclosing it all in, with some bench seats bolted to what had been the bed of the pick-up.  And ours was minimally accessorized.  No carpet or even floor mats.  No power anything except that it did have an electric starter, lights, and turn signals.  A small 283 cubic inch V-8 with a three speed shifter, the shift lever on the steering column.  It did have an AM radio, and a heater good for April through October.  With no carpet or body insulation, unless you were in the front seat you didn’t feel much heat except for being crammed with your other six siblings tightly together in the seats.  Conversely, with no insulation the mid-summer sunny hot days turned the interior into a slow-cooker.  The baptismal service when I experienced my second baptism, the first one I remember, was on a cold Sunday evening in January.  Fortunately for me the water heater was working.  I remember next to nothing about the service, what I said, how I felt, who else was there.  I think the preacher was Pastor Early, and I think his first name, which children could never utter, was Thomas.  No one called him Pastor Thomas.  It was always Pastor Early.  But I think it was Thomas since that is what I must have read on the sign out front.  Alpine Baptist Church is where I best remember standing next to my dad hearing him sing with gusto, although Baptists wouldn’t use that word since in the 1960s it was mostly associated with a Schlitz beer commercial that ran on television 1963-1967 with the line “You only go around once in life so you’ve got to grab for all the gusto you can.”  The songs I remember him seeming to love best include “In the Garden,” “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” “Trust and Obey,” “He Leadeth Me,” “Blessed Assurance,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name,” “Blessed Be the Name,” “I Will Sing the Wondrous Story,” “At the Cross,” “Nothing But the Blood,” “There is Power in the Blood,” “At Calvary,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Faith is the Victory,” and countless others.  While I remember nothing about my baptism, my second baptism, or the baptismal service, I remember one thing and one thing only.  When we got home that night, I forgot to get my wet clothes, wrapped up in a towel, out of the Suburban and in that cold January night my clothes froze rock solid.  I remembered them the next morning, and before the school bus came to take us to school, I went out to the Suburban, got my frozen clothes, and took them to put in the laundry tubs in the basement to thaw out so my mom could wash them.

Shoal Fish Pack Riding

If you are like the vast majority of cycling enthusiasts who live in the northern tier states, in late March you resume group rides that you haven’t done since late October.  If you have done group rides over the past five months, the groups have likely been smaller, under a dozen rather than thirty or more that you ride with the other seven months of the year.  Cyclists can maintain good levels of fitness during the five colder months, by cycling on a trainer, cycling outdoors when roads are dry, running, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, skating, spinning, and various other sorts of training.  What you don’t practice, or only rarely, in the cold months is pack riding.  When the end of March comes and you join back up with your group ride, everyone is eager to ride hard, in order to demonstrate their fitness level from winter training, or to begin to get in shape for some longer or harder summer rides.  You go from mostly going alone, to being in a pack of folks who have been going alone for five months, taking corners at speed, sprinting for village limit signs, attacking and chasing, working pace lines.  Those skills are a bit rusty.  In the first several group rides of the spring, I ride my older bike, not because of dirty roads, but because if I am going to crash because riders ahead start going down, I don’t want to damage my good bike.  Once riders have remembered and recovered sensible pack riding skills, then I ride my good bike.

Pack riding seems largely a matter of attention.  When I ride alone, I don’t have to think about other riders at my elbow when I want to avoid a road killed opossum, pothole, or crack in the pavement; I just steer around them.  I don’t have to think about the rider at my hip as I am entering or exiting a corner; I just pick my line and take the corner.  In pack riding, part of the reason my heart rate is higher is not just the harder effort; it is also partly the mental energy and adrenaline from recognizing I am in a more dangerous situation, needing the alertness to maintain my safety.  Still, it is not that complicated to ride in a fast pack.  Consider the following:

“Some fish swim together in shoals because the group provides more protection against predators, better foraging opportunities and, finally, and ideal place to find a mate.  As the shoal shimmies through the ocean, any individual can find itself in front and thus technically is the leader.  Such shoals, however, stay together not through centralized leadership but through local leadership and followership.  The movement of an individual is determined by what its immediate neighbour does (and the neighbour’s movement is determined by what its neighbour does).  Thus, the simple rule ‘do what the fish next to you does, but don’t bang into him’ can produce local leadership, in the form of a highly cohesive group moving around in a beautifully synchronized manner.  It is also clear that sticking to a simple rule like ‘do what your neighbour does’ does not require much brainpower.” (Mark van Vugt & Anjana Ahuja, Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership, New York: HarperCollins, 2011, p. 44).

Adapted to pack riding, do what the riders next to you and in front of you do, but don’t bang into them.  It doesn’t require much brainpower, and that is a good thing when you want to ride at an intense level.  Your brain constitutes about a fiftieth of your body weight but consumes close to a fifth of the calories you consume, so riding with less brainpower leaves more energy to be delivered to your heart, lungs, and legs.  It does, however, require attention and alertness.  If everyone followed that rule, it might be the only rule of pack riding.  But you cannot expect everyone to follow it.  So another rule: while alert to what is happening immediately next to and in front of you, pay attention to what is happening two to six riders ahead of you, in order to anticipate what is coming your way in a split second.  Is there a sudden swerve, a sudden acceleration or deceleration?

If you have watched professional bicycle racing, especially on television, you will see overhead shots from a helicopter of a pack of up to two hundred riders spread eight to ten wide in twenty to twenty five rows riding along at twenty-five miles per hour.  The flow and change in the pack is similar to fish swimming in a shoal.  It is fluid.  Riders moving up and back.  The pack shifting left or right to avoid road hazards.  The group floating around a bend in the road or turning a corner.  There is considerable trust in those around you, in all in the pack, that they won’t do something stupid and send several riders asphalt surfing.  Crashes occur, usually when there is some reason to take great risks in order to attempt to gain great rewards.  But in your local group rides, the rewards are so small or even non-existent that there is no need to take those risks.

Next time you are in a group ride, think like a shoaling fish.

High School Classmates and FB (and I don't mean football)

Over the past six months, I have had several high school classmates contact me through Facebook to get access to my Facebook site (I know, it is easier to just say “friend me”), and I have contacted several to get access to their sites.  That jogs my memory.  Few of us look much at all like we did 35 years ago.  Do I look recognizable, I wonder?

I had no Facebook friends from high school until about a year ago when Clark Stiles got in contact with me.  He came across my name doing a Google search a few years ago when Barb VanderKolk Smoes died of cancer.  I had written a story about my history of bicycle riding in which I referred to Carol Smoes (more on that later).  The Google search turned up that story, and that is how he found me.  Carol and I have exchanged Christmas cards for 20 or 30 years.  She is an artist, a graphic designer, and makes her own beautiful and interesting cards.  I had always wondered what Clark was up to.  He and I were Chemistry and Physics lab partners; I remember him liking Pink Floyd, Monty Python, and Dr. Demento.  I thought Clark was a genius.  He certainly was one of the smartest kids from my high school class, certainly one who read more widely than probably anyone else.  Since I was not too dimwitted, I have wondered since getting out of high school what other of the smart kids ended up doing—like Carol.  To be sure there were a good number of dipshits and dimwits.  I wonder what happened to some of them.  But I was much more interested in where the smart kids went and what they did.  It turned out to be pretty disappointing.  I thought there were a large number of intellectually sharp kids in my class, and expected there to be several who became doctors, attorneys, college professors, artists, leaders of various sorts.  Don’t get me wrong.  Many have had great success in lots of other respects.  I just expected much more temporal success.

Here is one example.  Early last summer I bumped into the valedictorian or salutatorian of my high school class at my nephew’s wedding and reception in a barn in Ravenna.  It was an eighty year old dairy barn, renovated for hosting weddings and parties.  The milking area was all painted white and gutters covered with steel plate.  The upper level, where the hay had been stored, was the banquet and dance floor area.  My classmate was very smart, very studious.  She had excelled at all subjects: math, sciences, literature, social sciences, music and arts.  I think she competed in some sports: volleyball or basketball.  And she was a cheerleader.  She played the piano at the wedding, and I recognized her.  I spoke with her during the reception in the hayloft.  She went to college for a year, and dropped out to get married.  After raising two or three kids, she went back to college, finished an education degree and teaches high school math.  I had expected her to become a physician or physicist.  Was I disappointed?  She looked very happy.  It seemed that she had been a good mother, as her kids seemed to be doing well.  She’d been married to the same person for probably thirty years.  She looked healthy, even to the point of not having gained more than a dozen pounds since high school.  Which, when you think about that alone is stunning.  Today, the average American adult weighs thirty or thirty-five more pounds than the average adult weighed in 1970.  Can you say “high fructose corn syrup”?  Can you say “soda every day”?  Can you say “what the hell is ‘cooking from scratch’”?  Can you say “why walk a mile when I can get in my car and drive it”?

Another example is Clark.  I said that I had always wondered what he did.  I expected him to become something like a biochemical engineer, or a chemist working at Dow Chemical or Amway or some pharmaceutical company.  He was brilliant and creative, just what you want in a research scientist.  Shortly after he had gotten in contact with me, I was going from Minnesota where I lived to Michigan to visit my parents.  I got in contact with Clark and made arrangements to meet.  He had gone to college for a year or two or three.  But somewhere in there a close friend killed himself, but it wasn’t exactly a suicide.  Clark was crushed by the event.  He dropped out of college.  He eventually, I don’t know if it was within a year or a dozen of years, got a job working for the state social services.  I think he worked with the poor and disabled.  About a dozen years ago he took a similar job at Salvation Army, doing drug and alcohol rehabilitation.  No Ph.D. lab scientist like I expected, Jeez Louise not even a college degree.  He never finished it.  Where is he now?  Giving cups of cold water to the least of these.  I also found out a lot about Clark, and about teachers from my high school, that I didn’t know.  The house where Clark grew up, on East Randall or Arthur (same road, the name changes somewhere close to the house) just east of the railroad tracks, is a Centennial Farm.  That means it has been in the same family for over 100 years.  His grandparents were farmers there.  The house passed onto his father.  His father hated farming.  He started or took over a grocery store in Coopersville, and leased out the land to other farmers.  Clark grew up poor, but they always had enough to eat from the store.  Somewhere around junior high his dad gave up the grocery and became some sort of a traveling salesman, and did very well.  Suddenly the family had money for things other than food.  I also found out about some of the teachers.  A couple were alcoholics (including the band and the government instructors, the superintendent and vice principal), and were fine as long as they were sober.  I guess with his dad having been a grocer, and his mom active in the local Methodist Church, they knew stuff, and got to learn stuff that my family was never privy to.  We lived ten miles from the school and went to church ten miles in the opposite direction.  We never got to learn shit on anyone.  Maybe a good thing.  I had no particular reason to dislike or disrespect a teacher, except when they were pompous asses, like the one rotund English teacher who was such a dickhead and whose name fails me now, but even if I were to recall it I should keep it to myself.

I often also wonder where girls I liked in grade and high school ended up.  Late in my freshman year, I was very attracted to Carol.  In the summer I had driver’s training at the high school.  That was ten miles from my house.  Several times I had to ride my bicycle there, because my parents had only one car, and my dad needed it to go to work.  Maybe we had two by then, but my mom or one of my older sisters needed the car.  So I got around by bicycle.  Driver’s training was every morning.  If I recall correctly, on several days, but not everyday, we had driving in the afternoon, three of us with the instructor.  The cars were equipped with a brake pedal for the instructor.  I remember driving to restaurants where the instructor, some athletic coach, could get coffee, a donut, and suck down a cigarette or two to calm his nerves.  Then back on the road again, being driven around for several hours by fifteen year old, barely post-pubescent kids.  You'd think he would have had us stop at a cafe next to a bar; we'd go to the cafe for a coke and fires, while he'd slip into the bar for a mid-afternoon boilermaker.  Maybe that was on the way home after the daily sessions.  When I had the full day of driver’s training activities, I would ride my bike two miles north of school to Carol’s and spend the lunch time break with her.  Her mother and a younger brother were always there.  Her dad was the town barber.  I never met him.  Carol is a graphic artist, still very beautiful.  She graduated from high school weighing all of eighty-five pounds, maybe ninety.  I am not kidding.  And she wasn’t anorexic or bulimic. Even now she looks awfully close to a buck even in weight at the most.  She got a BFA, her husband is a successful architect.

I have kept in contact with my junior year girlfriend, Jayne Fettig.  She went to college, got a degree in English, I believe.  She got married just out of college, and raised a litter, five kids I think, and several of them are spitting images of her face.  Her husband owns a gravel pit, hauling, and snow removal company.  She has worked alongside him for about thirty years now, driving truck or operating the front end loader.  She was always tough.  I was to her house, about fifteen or twenty years ago, and saw all those kids that looked like her.  No doubt who they belonged to.

For a brief period about twenty-five or thirty years ago, I had gotten in contact with a girlfriend I had from midway through my sophomore year, after I got my driver’s license, until into my junior year.  Her name was Sherry Terry.  She went to another school, and I met her at church youth group.  I liked her.  She was attractive.  I must say I never had any unattractive girlfriends.  I was shallow.  You had to at least be good looking if I was going to be interested in you as a girlfriend.  Sherry was very cute, pretty in fact.  And she was smart.  I guess that criterion raises me a step just above abject shallowness.  All my girlfriends were smart.  If you couldn’t do geometry, algebra, chemistry and physics, and weren’t interested in reading good literature, you could go to Burger King and listen to the Bee Gees or America or Captain and Tennile or Olivia Newton John or Eagles with someone else.  Like I said, I liked her, but was unsure that she liked me.  I found out after a youth group meeting when I asked her if she wanted a ride home instead of calling her parents to come pick her up.  She lived about four miles from church.  She said yes.  I was pretending to be a gentleman, and opened the passenger side door of my 1967 Pontiac Tempest Custom, two-door medium blue, with a 326 cubic inch V-8 and a two speed transmission.  She got in.  And slid over to the middle of the front seat!  So when I got around the back of the car and entered the driver’s seat, she was up next to me!  Gosh she was sweet.  I bet she was that sweet for her next boyfriend, and for the man who eventually became her husband.  I am not sure what happened to her after high school.  I think she went to Lake Superior State College (now University), but don’t know if she graduated.  I know she got married, becoming Sherry Quackenbush.  I don’t know if that was a better name change.  I heard from one of my sisters about five years ago that she bumped into her in a chiropractor’s office.  Over the past several years when I would visit my parents, I would go for a bicycle ride for twenty to seventy miles, and plan the route to take me past the house where she lived on Indian Lakes Road by the Rogue River Golf Course.  Back in high school, I lived about fourteen miles from Sherry’s.  My parents have moved, and now live less than ten miles from where she used to live.  On one of those rides, one closer to seventy miles, I also rode past the house where Carol grew up.  And another time I rode my bicycle past Jayne’s childhood home.

I wonder also about a lot of the guys that were my friends and acquaintances from high school.  I think, however, I am more interested in how my former girlfriends are doing.  I don’t think that is creepy.  I think it is because I genuinely liked them.  Indeed, I think I genuinely loved them.  I think I continued to love them enough to hope and want the best for them.  I wanted to know that they were doing well.  Yes, as a teenager, I think I could be in love, I could love people.  In fact, I broke up with one of my high school girlfriends (and maybe the only one I broke up with, the rest dumped me, always resulting in a heart break for me) because I thought I wasn’t good enough for her, that she deserved someone better than me.  Really, I am not kidding.  She was beautiful and smart, so that wasn’t it.  She had a good heart, a very good heart.  She probably had one of the finest characters of any in our graduating class.  I felt like I would corrupt her, detract from the good soul she was.  Not to this day  have I told her that I broke up with her because I felt I was not going to be good for her.  I remember the experience because when I told her I wasn’t going to be her boyfriend anymore, she was devastated as only a fifteen year old girl can be when she feels rejected by a boy she likes.  She sobbed, and I remember to this day her saying to me in a nasally crying voice, “you hate me, you don’t love me anymore.”  I said “I don’t hate you,” but I didn’t try to explain it any further.  I was heart-broke that I broke her heart.  Maybe it is too pompous or phony chivalry, paternalistic before I was even a pater; I felt I owed it to her to get her away from me.  She felt emotionally hurt, and I felt lousy for hurting her.

About a month ago I got out my high school yearbook and looked through the photos of my classmates.  Several I couldn’t remember a thing about.  Several I could, some of those things not very flattering.  Things like, “I remember he smelled bad.”  “I remember he was really stupid.”  “I remember she was what we considered fat, but nowadays would be just barely bigger than the average sized high school girl.”  “I remember he had bad acne.”  For all I know, I may be the only one who got a Ph.D., and the only one to be a college professor.  Surely it is odd to have a graduate of a farming community high school become a philosopher.  I wonder when they look at my photo what they remember about me.  I probably don’t want to know.  Or I hope that what they remember is much worse than what I am now.  Strangely, I hope their memories are not very flattering of me.  And I hope that were they to meet me now and spend an hour or two with me sucking down some ale, they would be surprised in a good way.  One would hope that thirty-five years would bring some improvement.

Hope and Church

I often think about where I am now compared to a year ago.  December 11, 2009 I was told, in effect, that my career was over.  I was numb, angry, sad, confused, scared, afraid, embarrassed.  What would I tell Beth?  “We should have stayed in Toledo.“ “I made another mistake, thus one very costly.”  “I don’t know where we will be living or what I will be doing seven months from now.”  “Are you ready to start over with just about nothing?”  I had no hope for a good future.  Hope, for me, is confident expectation.  It is a strong belief for something to come that you don’t now have very good reason to believe will take place.  Others would assure me with what at the time felt like pious platitudes.  “God is going to take what feels to you like a low inside pitch and knock it out of the ball park.”  You cannot now see the good future God has for you.”  “All things work together for good to those who love God” (maybe true enough, but I felt like I wasn’t one of those).  “God has great plans for you that exceed your expectations.”  “You have so many good qualities that you will land on your feet in a better situation.”  I didn’t much believe any of it.

But I think there were a lot of folks who had belief, hope, and trust for me.  They probably too had lots of good wishes.  Good wishes do not often come true.  For me, right now, it feels like they have.  I am glad I can’t take credit for having enough faith, hope, and trust that they would.  I am glad that I can say it was others’ hope, trust, and faith that made the difference.  Or maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe it was just God’s good pleasure.  If it were my faith and hope, I could then tell others just to have faith and keep hope.  And if things do not work out well for them, they could blame themselves for lacking faith and hope.  Think of all the folks who have faith, hope, and trust that something bad will change for the good.  And as best as anyone can see, it doesn’t.  I would like to be the last one who might blame them for lack of faith, hope, and trust.

Even though I am mostly a Calvinist as far as deep theological issues go, so that I am supposed to agree with the whole sovereignty of God thing, deep down it is one doctrine I doubt.  On the sovereignty doctrine, God is in control of everything; not one hair of your head can fall without your Father in Heaven willing it.  I doubt it.  For if I were to believe it, I’d have to think that my losing my job at Bethel, that Aunt Nancy getting cancer, that all awful things happen with my Father in Heaven willing it.  No, I don’t accept the sovereignty of God in that sense.  But I do accept something like the supremacy of God.  I think there is an infection, a defect, in all of life.  However it got here (Satan, the human rebellion against God, the natural less-than-God nature of a created world), it is here.  I genuinely believe that there are some, indeed many things that happen outside of God’s will, things that even make God sad.  Things where even God thinks “that is awful, things shouldn’t happen like that, people shouldn’t treat each other like that.”  I think deeply of God as a Father.  A good father wants best for his spouse and children.  But a father can’t control it all.  Bad things happen, and the father is in a deep funk, crushed with sadness because he can’t fix it.  But where God is different, and here is my view of God’s supremacy, is that God is not only like a father, he is like the World Master Chess player.  Give Him any move, and he can make the right next move.  The hair from your head may fall without your Father in Heaven willing it.  But He knows it fell, and knows how to do something about it if something needs to be done about it.

No, I don’t think God willed the loss of my job at the Christian college where I was teaching, with all the negative consequences of that, like now having to live 650 miles away from my sweet children, like being at $0 equity after paying on houses for 25 years.  I really think God was saddened by what happened to me.  Am I sure? Do I think God cares enough about even me that when a bad thing happens to me He is at all bothered by it?  Yes, I think so.  And God, the Master Chess Player, thinks, okay, here is my next move.  You got a bad deal.  Surprise, surprise, even Christians treat each other like shit often enough.  It is not you, particularly; it is just that Christians (and aren’t you one of them, Eric?) don’t have the best track record of treating other people, fellow Christians included, the way they ought to be treated.  Things were not the way they were supposed to be.  Of course, you are far from perfect, not often even very good.  But you belong to Me (thinks God), you are my child, and I am going to find or make a gift for you.  I am going to surprise you.  And when you get the gift, don’t forget where it came from.  Don’t waste it.  Have hope, faith, and trust, at least a bit more than a year ago, and learn how to encourage others to hope, believe, and have trust.

For me too, it is one of the reasons that I have to attach myself to a local Christian community, a church.  I do this eyes wide open.  I know they are not perfect.  I know this intimately because I know I am far from perfect and I am one of them!  I attach myself to a church because I often, very often need others to have faith, hope, and trust for me.  While I don’t welcome it, I suppose I need their pious platitudes.  It turns out that some of them are just fucking true.

Last week my son was in town (from 650 miles away).  While here he took a 100 mile trip to another town where a friend of his from grade and high school days lives.  Late in the day, they came here.  They were friends from about eight years old.  They got in trouble together, caused trouble together, probably did enough bad stuff to almost get themselves killed.  But they are survivors.  They went to a Christian school.  Had seriously Christian parents, went to a seriously Christian church.  And they both fucked up a bit.  And survived.  We went to a restaurant for a little to eat, and to have a few beers together.  Holy cripes! $5 for a beer.  Okay, calm down, they were draft, Sam Adams—so fashionable—a winter wheat, and large 24 ounce glasses.  They told stories, most of which I had not heard before and would not have been privy to as a parent when they were in their teens.  I felt privileged to be allowed into their lives, to be told some of their exploits.  I am glad they both had parents who would take the risk to give their children freedoms to make mistakes, to do stupid stuff, hoping that they would have enough sense to step off the ice if it started to crack.  We talked.  They are both sour on churches, in my estimation because they expect church-goers to be so much better than they themselves are.  I understand that.  Many rail against the disreputable and hypocritical church folks.  If hypocrisy were our only fault, we’d be doing pretty well.  It turns out that us church-goers say mean things to those closest to us, eat too much, waste too much time on wasteful and stupid activities, fritter our lives away in trivialities, are also liars, cheats, drunkards, drug abusers, malicious, deceivers, spiteful, trying to be independent and autonomous while yet lacking basic self-control.  We are a whole lot worse than just hypocrites.  The sooner my son and his friend find that out, and just decide to get together with a bunch of other fuck-ups to try their best to worship God, to support each other, to share in their trials and successes, the better off they will be.  When there is no good reason for them to hope for a good future, there will be others to have hope for them.

Christmas Greeting, 2010

Merry Christmas, December 2010

Last Christmas was my hardest Christmas ever.  Two weeks before Christmas, Bethel University administrators told me they were cutting my job due to budget cuts.  At my age, that almost certainly would mean the end of my career as a college professor.  I felt like a deer in the headlights.  I was pretty numb for quite a while.  I applied to about 140 jobs.  Five were senior-level faculty positions; I was a finalist at one (they hired an inside candidate), and the other four withdrew their searches.  Twenty-five were beginning level faculty positions; none of them showed interest in me, in part perhaps because I was a senior candidate.  About twenty were in non-academic careers: sales, marketing, fund-raising; a few showed a little interest, maybe just because of the peculiarity of a Ph.D. in Philosophy applying for those jobs.  Over eighty were in lower-level academic administration positions at smaller colleges or community colleges: chairs of departments, deans, provosts, vice-presidents for academic affairs.  A handful showed some interest, for example by asking for more information, essays, administrative philosophy statements.  In April I had a telephone interview for a dean’s position.  In May I had an interview for a chairperson position.  After the chairperson interview, I got a call-back for a second interview.  By around July 4, I got an acceptable job offer as Chairperson of the Humanities and Performing Arts Department at Lansing Community College.  I started my new job August 2.

Beth and I left Vadnais Heights, MN on July 26, leaving behind Kevin and Jayne.  For just over two weeks we lived in a travel trailer behind my sister’s house, 145 mile round-trip commute to my job in Lansing.  We moved into our house on August 13.  Just like three years ago, we are paying two mortgages, waiting for our house in Vadnais Heights to sell.  We hope it sells soon, and for more than we owe on it.  We love our new house, location, and job.  We miss our kids terribly.  When the house sells, they will likely stay in Minnesota.  The job situation there is much better than in Michigan (MN unemployment rate is 7.1%, MI is 12.8%).

We now live within about an hour’s drive to most of our relatives.  That is wonderful.  Being in Michigan, I know some good places to fish and hunt.  I am just over a two hour drive from one of my favorite places in Michigan:  Hoxeyville and the Pine River.  I have a 16 mile round trip commute to work; I commuted by bicycle all fall, up until our recent snow storm which made the roads icy. I will be back on my bike as soon as the ice is off the roads.  I play hockey with my brother and nephew on a team Sunday nights.  We found a good church, just over 2 miles from our house.  We are blessed.

My job is fully administrative, no teaching.  I loved teaching, it was my passion.  But that career was ended for me.  Not being a professor, the time I used to spend reading for my classes and for research I now spend reading good fiction and a lot of Michigan history.  I like my new job, and have good people to work with.  It is meaningful and important work.  I am grateful.  A year ago, I could have never imagined things working out so well.  It isn’t perfect.  Because of the two moves over the past three years, with trying to sell houses in a declining market, we find ourselves pretty much broke, living paycheck-to-paycheck.  And we are grateful, because we are living pretty well.  My standard of living is in the top 1% of the world’s people.  I’d like to think that the quality of my life is also in the top 1%, but there is still a lot of work to do to get there.  I yearn for Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify,” or Dick Proenneke’s wilderness, except that I want access to books, to be with Beth, to have good food and health care, to spend time with family and friends, to have a reliable vehicle to drive to Hoxeyville, maybe even to have a cell phone to talk to my kids regularly, a good bike, and the list gets long.

You probably know what I mean.  I want it all, and the all I want is often not the all I need.

Can Ride Meditation

It was in the mid 30s, with patches of snow across the medium brown clay and sandy dirt out back.  There was less than an inch of snow covering the small pond behind the house.  The morning was quite hazy, warmer air above the colder ground.  The haze lifted just before noon.  Initially I got my mountain bike ready to ride, then realized I wanted to pick up cans on the ride and it would be much better to take my single-speed commuting bike with saddle bags.  So I switched the heart rate monitor to that bike.  The temperature was such that I could wear knee warmers under black tights; I didn’t need to wear my more insulated and completely wind-proof tights.  I could also wear my thin, blue windbreaker, not the warmer black jacket.  Under my helmet, I could wear a thin skull hat, not a full balaclava.

The roads were clear and mostly dry.  There were occasional wet spots where trees on the south side of the road shaded snow that had been blown onto the road.  As I headed east, intending to turn north after half a mile, I felt a strong east wind, enough to make it difficult to go much faster than 13 mph on the flats.  I was going to head north for a mile, and then west for seven or more miles.  That would have meant having to come back into the headwind.  I decided to continue on eastward into the wind.  I find it easier to go out into a headwind than to come back into a headwind.  I went five miles into the wind before turning north.

Since I decided to pick up cans and bottles, my focus and thought when riding was on the side of the road and the ditches.  I was attentive to glimmers of silver, blue, red, and green.  Most beer cans are blue, medium to light blue.  Many also have significant amounts of silver.  Plus when they are sitting on their top or bottom in the grass or snow, the ends sticking up are silver.  Only a few beer cans are red; Coke cans, of course, are red.  Mountain Dew are green.  I get a few bottles, rarely a brown glass beer bottle; more often a Coke or Mountain Dew plastic bottle, and about a third of them had been used for chew spit juice.  Most cans and bottles had contained beer.  Almost all of them still contain an ounce or two.  When it is freezing cold, the beer becomes chunks of ice or slush in the can.  I try to get it out, but some is too frozen.  They make a mess of my panniers.  I did collect 36 over a 100 minute ride, and all but six were beer cans.  My saddle bags, or panniers, were full.  I don’t think I could have collected one more.  Over the last two miles on dirt roads, they rattled and clinked together, almost bouncing out.

Usually when I ride my bike, I think about people, work, events, tasks.  During this ride, I was focused on only one thing: sighting cans in the ditch.  Sure, I heard traffic coming up behind or approaching from ahead.  That seemed significantly in the background.  My attention was on one thing.  My attention was focused.  It was meditative.  One meditation technique involves focusing on a single idea, word, thought, image, phrase, sound.  The aim is to still the mind; it is mental exercise.  When I awake at night and my mind is racing over events, difficulties, challenges, things I need to get done, and planning on how to get things done, I cannot get back to sleep and get frustrated by it.  One image that has helped still my mind and enable me to get back to sleep is to focus on a grain of rice.  Not a bowl of rice.  A single grain.

Riding my bike focused on trying to catch glimpses of colors that might indicate a can seemed very relaxing and meditative.  Instead of my mind wandering all over my life, it rested.  By concentrating on one thing, it rested.  I have heard people talk about being “fully in the moment,” and I thought it was woo-woo new age religious code language that made someone sound profound when it seemed to me they were just goofy.  It is analogous to what I take to be the sometimes empty church-talk, for example when someone tells me they had a quiet time, or spent time in the word, or communed with the Lord in prayer, or am under conviction, or that the joy of the Lord is their strength.  Imagine someone who had never before hung out with church folk going to a church and hearing people talk like that.  What images might come to their mind?  Had they hung out enough with church folk, and acquired a cynical edge, they might think that “having a quiet time” is a way to indicate particular piety, much better than saying that you read some religiously meaningful paragraph or two and spent some time thinking about how you hoped to conduct yourself that day.

Being fully in the moment.  What is that?  Given my experience on my can ride, I think it might be to be fully focused upon, fully attentive to, and fully given to one thing.  To be undistracted.  When done right, I think a lot of sport and athletics is like that.  So too is making love, when done right: fully focused upon, fully attentive to, fully given to one thing.  Perhaps the fullness of focus, attention, and giving is why one seeks silence and solitude in order to meditate.  For me, silence and solitude usually do not lead to meditation.  They lead to thoughts about all that distresses me, all that I need to get done.  But there are times when silence and solitude can put me “fully in the moment.”  As I think about it, as I scour my memory, I recall times fishing when, if someone were to ask me what I was thinking about while I spent three or six hours wading in a river and casting for trout, my answer would have honestly been “nothing.”

Or the twenty-five hours I spent inside a 42” x 42” x 72” wooden deer blind in mid-November.  From the outside, the blind looked a lot like an outhouse with a six inch high opening all the way around at eye height.  I walked out to the blind in the dark, an hour or more before sun-up, a moonless predawn, clear sky revealing more stars than one deserves to see.  Open the door and flip on my headlamp.  Set my rifle barrel on one opening with the butt of the maple stock on an opposite opening.  Wiggle out of my backpack.  Set my thermoses, one containing coffee, one containing onion soup, on the floor in a corner.  Set my water bottle in another corner.  Set my pee bottle in another corner.  Hang my rattling antlers and grunt call on a nail.  Unbutton my shirts to cool off.  Replace my hunter orange stocking hat with a dark blue wool hat.  Take a seat on the stool.  Flip off my headlamp, take it off, and hang it on a nail.  Raise my binoculars to see if anything is visible: it is too dark to even focus the binoculars.  I sit back, resting my back against one wall, staring out into the dark.  Every five minutes or so I look to the eastern sky to detect the first hint of coming daylight.  Coyotes yelp and bark.  Cooled off from the walk to the blind, I button up and add a layer.  After thirty minutes or more I stand for thirty minutes, then sit and repeat.  Daylight comes.  I might see a deer, or a part of a deer moving through the woods.  The first noisy blue jay announces itself an hour after sun-up.  Nuthatches scoot head-first down a tree, and land on the window sill of the blind.  A couple of crows, and a raven appear around 10 am.  A few hours after noon the Pileated Woodpecker passes through.  I see a Flicker, and a Downy Woodpecker.  I hear cars and pick-up trucks carrying others to and from hunting locations or work.

I was in the blind, never exiting (except to search an hour for the buck I shot), Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday 6:15-11:30 am, and Monday and Tuesday 2:30-5:30 pm.  70 cubic feet of space of a monastery, voluntarily confined for twenty-five hours.  I recall that I thought about nothing; I was only attentive, straining to hear anything audible, and to see anything visible.  My mind was still.  I belonged to the world.  Put me in a shopping mall and I am exhausted after an hour, two at the most.  Put me in a river or a deer blind, and I seem to grow into it.  I become part of it.  Separation from it is an amputation.

Too, this time of year a 60 minute bike ride is about as long as I ride.  I was out 100 minutes.  Apart from the full, almost over-flowing panniers, I could have gone another hour or more.  The average effort I put out was not easy.  I wore my heart rate monitor.  Average heart rate for the 100 minutes (the heart rate monitor was actually running about 110 minutes or more; I didn’t stop it when I stopped to pick-up a can) was 129 beats per minute.  In the summer, that heart rate during a 100 minute ride on my road bike would allow me to average over 20 miles per hour.  My can ride was not easy, in spite of making 36 stops and getting those short rests.

After heading east five miles and turning north, I went four miles north before turning west.  Now I had a tailwind.  Riding my single speed, I was spinning at a high rate.  There were a couple of good hills where I could stand and pedal, give my sit bones a rest, and grind up the hills.  I continued west for eight miles.  Along the way I stopped at the St. Francis Retreat Center in DeWitt.  I had driven by it several times in the car, and ridden my bike by it a few times.  I rode in and rode around it. It looked quite peaceful there.  They host contemplative retreats.  The grounds have several tall and large pine trees.  I used the seclusion of the large pines to stop and pee downwind.  After heading west eight miles, I had four miles to go south, and three miles east to get home.  It made for a very peaceful, relaxing ride.  Contemplative, attending to one thing.