Striving to ride

Women are still vastly underrepresented in the world of horse racing

It was the stuff of movies, the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in real life. Except that it did. The horse who seemed like a dud was running dead last, and then in the final stretch he began to move up, and he kept moving and moving and moving.

Golden Tempo didn’t just move into first place; he streaked past the other horses and made the finish look effortless. What a great way to be introduced to the Kentucky Derby and horse racing.

That wasn’t all. The horse and his jockey, José Ortiz, were stars in that moment, but history had just been made. Golden Tempo’s trainer, Cherie DeVaux, was the first female to have a winning horse in the Derby’s 152-year history.

Now, I like horses. As a kid, I got to ride a lot, thanks to Brenda, a neighbor who owned a pair of horses—Daisy and Davey--and invited me along many times. I remember reading about Secretariat and Seattle Slew, two Triple Crown winners in the 1970s, but I never watched those events. Instead, I was probably off riding Daisy or Davey.

This spring, I vacationed with six women and on Derby Day, friend Jane cajoled us into watching and placing pretend bets on the horses. Unfortunately, none of us picked Golden Tempo. I was intrigued by all of it.

Horse racing is a strange world to the uninitiated, and sometimes the uninitiated notice things that those familiar no longer see. Sort of like children who blurt out an uncomfortable truth. How could it be that in 152 years of the Derby no other female trainer had a winning horse?

Well, because there are few female trainers, for one thing. In the history of the Derby, fewer than 20 women have been trainers of starting horses. In 2017, Thoroughbred Racing Commentary reported that, of the top 500 trainers in the world, exactly 25 were women. 25! That’s Two-Five! Ridiculous!

I’m struggling to understand what’s so threatening about a woman training a race horse. Sure, this sport is an expensive one, to say the least, but financial barriers for women seem to be falling faster than the old boys’ club determined to keep the fair sex standing on the sidelines in pretty hats.

Besides, the sexism doesn’t end there. I noticed that all of the jockeys were male.

In the three events that make up the Triple Crown (Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont Stakes), no female jockey raced in any of those events this year.

Until 1986, US racing boards were under no obligation to award licenses to female jockeys. Sometimes it takes a lawsuit, and in this case, that’s what happened. So racing boards now comply with the law, but the racing establishment doesn’t have to like it, and it seems that they don’t. Today, in the top levels of racing, male jockeys outnumber females by 50 to 1.

In the history of the Kentucky Derby, only six female jockeys have had the honor of appearing in that race. Rider Rosie Napravnik rode the Derby in 2011, 2013, and 2014, a rare feat. Napravnik also rode in the Preakness the same year, which was the last time a female jockey appeared there.

In the Belmont Stakes, only two females have ever ridden, and Napravnik was one of the two. In 2013, she made her second appearance in the Belmont, and no other female jockey has ridden since.

The dearth of female jockeys is inverse to the numbers in recreational horse riding, where women outnumber men at least three to one. It’s as though there’s an unspoken rule that women can and should go for trail rides but that’s it.

And if they enter the racing world, they are more than welcome to muck out the stalls; but if they aspire to ride in the big time, it will be a long, hard road.

One female jockey, B.J. Rubin, who preceded Napravnik, was barred from entering the horse barns at the tracks. She was told she was “bad luck.” The males-only jockey club pushed her out completely, threatening to close the track if Rubin was allowed to ride.

Frozen out, she went to the Bahamas to race until the boycott against her dissolved.

When Napravnik started racing, she went by the name A.R. Napravnik to hide her gender. She probably took her cue from Rubin. On the track, though, things were still rough. She told “60 Minutes” in 2013 that male jockeys would push her against the rails or wedge her between two horses. Still, she persisted.

And let’s talk about weight. All jockeys must make weight in order to race. In the Triple Crown, jockeys may weigh no more than 118 pounds. That fact alone should, ahem, tip the scales in favor of women, who typically weigh less than males.

In an article published in “Socius” in 2017, the authors argue that since men have more muscle mass and muscle weighs more, it’s more challenging for male jockeys to make weight.

They resort to extreme methods of cutting weight: starvation, dehydration, purging, pills, all unhealthy behaviors.* Typically, then, because they must be so weight-conscious, many male jockeys are underweight, which puts their long-term health at risk.

Men’s higher muscle mass has been the standard argument for why women couldn’t or shouldn’t be jockeys. They argue that women wouldn’t be strong enough. But strength is not the only measure by which a jockey can succeed.

In that “60 Minutes” interview, Napravnik’s sister, Jazz, said, “I think if strength is what men have to their advantage, I think women would have finesse.” Jazz talked about her sister’s “special connection” with the horses, and her track record proved that.

Horse racing is unusual because male and female jockeys compete side-by-side, rather than in sex-segregated categories. This goes a long way to explain the continued dearth of women at the highest echelons of the sport. When given a level playing field, statistics show that female jockeys outperform males.

And there it is: Female jockeys are too much of a threat. At some level, the horse racing establishment knows this, of course, but sexism is gonna sexism as long as it can.

Someday, perhaps a woman will burst on the racing scene as the true badass she is, whispering her magic into her mount’s ear and clinching all three titles of the crown. It’ll be the stuff of movies.

For now, though, we can celebrate that Cherie DeVaux’s Golden Tempo won the Belmont Stakes on June 6, once again coming from dead last and streaking ahead to win by one and one-quarter lengths.

Golden Tempo was again ridden by José Ortiz, who spoke about the horse in a way that made me think that Oritz knew the secret of finesse, too. It’s not just the province of women, after all. Then why isn’t the track big enough for everyone?

*This is not to say that female jockeys are immune from some of the same weight-conscious concerns, but the issues tend to be more pronounced for men.

DATELINE: Trinity Sunday, Iowa Highway 20, heading west

Just because Montana is big doesn’t mean it merits sole bragging rights to big sky. I’ve been through Montana several times. They’ve got nothing on us; there’s big sky here, too. And that sky can hold forth quite a show.

There’s a shade of carnelian in a cloudless sky that acts like a hypnotic. Have you seen it? The strictly factual say that carnelian doesn’t exist. They say it’s chalcedony, but where’s the poetry in that? Give me carnelian for a moment or two.

Sometimes the expanse overhead is cornflower served with a stunning side of cumulonimbus. Hex code #6495ED, if you insist.

Or periwinkle. Have you seen a periwinkle sky? It’s not my favorite shade, but it’s not up to us, is it? The palette shifts from day to day. No matter what the hue, it’s quite a show.

Today, the sky is not showing off so much as inviting study in a wet-on-wet watercolor wash of smoke and steel, stone and ash.

If I could only paint like that. If I had only learned to control the flow of paint on paper or understand when to let the paint go where it wanted.

There are moments—into the mystic--when the soul is content, where nothing has happened or changed, except the inner landscape. It’s glorious spring and I’ve no wish for a river to skate away on. There’s only this ribbon of road stretching away from those I love, heading west.

Oh, those I love. One child ran to be held and clutched on tightly. One child giggled when I said, “Bless you,” over and over. One child was baptized in a white princess dress, all smiles until the priest poured water in her eyes.

Bless the children.

A baby robin got caught in the window well where I stayed. Its father perched nervously above, morsels for the little one dangled from his beak. Mr. Robin tried to land in the window well, but it was a tricky operation, and he aborted the mission. I opened the window. Perhaps I could flush out the baby somehow.

At that moment, the little bird shifted its plump, dappled body and lifted up and out. Like Dorothy in Oz, it had the power to leave all along.

This is not a story with a moral. It’s just a way of paying attention.

The miles roll on. I don’t know the song that mentions California as I drive and think on all these things. The sound of the chords mixes with the wash of the sky and the stunning green fields.

It’s a portrait of contentment, the soul at rest.

Mine is a small life spent shuttling many miles on a highway that normally numbs my brain. Today this life feels as big as an Iowa sky over a ribbon of road, heading home.

A lot of us like to sing, right? We bellow with glee as little kids and it’s fun. Then, slowly we get told to dial down the volume. Eventually, some singers emerge as true vocal talent. They get solos.

The rest of us may stay in choir because it’s still fun, and we’re with friends, but we’ll never shine. We know that. Still, there are those moments—you know what I mean—where the harmony aligns in near perfection. The tone is pure.

Something shifts; the air crackles with electricity, and you and everyone around you is lifted by the vibrations emanating through your vocal chords. It’s magical. I have been chasing that magic most of my adult life.

I once organized a church choir because it seemed like it would bring people together. I did not conduct, and I did not accompany, but I did corral the chorale, and it was fun while it lasted.

Then, one summer, a young music teacher put an area choir together, and it drew young and old from Newell, Storm Lake, Alta, and Aurelia, perhaps Cherokee, too. We sang at Alta’s Night Out in the city park, and it, too, was fun.

A year or so later, an adjunct at Buena Vista University started an early music choir. I sang with real musicians, and I was out of my depth. They obliged me even though I was lost much of the time. It, too, was fun while it lasted.

Around the same time, a friend and I went to a weekend-long adult choir camp at Luther College for a couple of summers. Again, singing with real musicians was a workout that I was not in musical shape for. What I really loved was the after-hours “beer choir.”

In other words, for people like me who love music, who can carry a tune, but aren’t trained musicians, there aren’t a ton of just-for-fun places for group singing.

One day, a friend posted a video on social media showing some everyday Canadians singing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I had to know more. The throng of voices was led by two friends, Daveed Goldman, who played guitar and Nobu Adilman, who conducted.

Their idea was simple. Invite people to a bar. Teach them to sing an arrangement of a popular song. Practice harmony. Put it all together. Have fun. Connect with other humans.

It was not a performance. There was no audience. It was just for the sheer joy of singing together. People of all ages and walks of life showed up and clamored for more.

I spent countless hours watching video after video on their YouTube channel. This non-competitive, low-stakes, open-participation event lit the pleasure AND reward areas in my brain.

For years, I dreamed of making the trek to Toronto, where Choir! Choir! Choir! was based. They met in various bars. The places were packed. Sometimes people were turned away. Sometimes they didn’t meet. The logistics for someone coming from afar seemed problematic.

And then, people from all over wanted their own Choir! Choir! Choir! experiences. In 2017, Daveed and Nobu (who sometimes go by DaBu) began touring. This meant that they were in Toronto less frequently, and with that, logistics seemed even more problematic.

At first, DaBu visited mostly Canadian cities, but after the worst of COVID passed, they began to appear in big American cities, sometimes with famous singers joining them. I followed the C! C! C! tours and salivated. How far would I have to travel?

Somehow, someone had the good sense to nab them for smaller venues, too. When I discovered they were booked to perform in mid-May at the Temple Theater in Des Moines, I knew it was time.

The friend who introduced me to C! C! C! was all in, too, and she brought another friend, a newbie. I had expected that DaBu would follow their old protocol of rehearsing just one song, getting it down pat, and then filming the final product.

But no, they now do an evening of songs by a given artist: ABBA songs or Fleetwood Mac or, on our night, the songs of Queen.

“Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”

Oh, it was real, all right. So real that DaBu agreed to do two shows instead of just the one originally scheduled.

“Don’t stop me now, cause I’m havin’ a good time!”

It was grand, even better than I hoped. I felt the electricity, and it was over much too soon.

Choir! Choir! Choir! is where those who feel consigned to sing in the shower or the car find their people at last. I’m often shy, but afterward, I walked up to Nobu and said, “Thank you for not making me come to Toronto.”

Instead, I wish I’d said, “Oooo, you ma[d]e me live!”

It’s not that I wouldn’t want to visit Toronto. It’s just that I never thought they’d come to a place like Des Moines.

They said they were impressed by the sound we made. They said they would come to Des Moines again. We’ll hold you to that, DaBu!

Last week, I wrote about all the good things that the Americans with Disabilities Act has brought for people with disabilities. I also wrote that Universal Design and Access have continued to expand access opportunities for everyone.

In other words, ramps, automatic doors, and digital information displays have been major improvements in getting where we all need to go, but we haven’t reached the end of the road. Not by a long shot.

In 2024 the Department of Justice updated part of its regulations of the ADA requiring that “web content and mobile applications (apps) are accessible to people with disabilities.”

What does this mean exactly? Well, if you’ve ever wandered into the settings on a TV, looking for closed captions and clicked the wrong option, you may have heard a voice begin to describe what was happening on the screen.

I listened to this feature once, and it was an exhaustive description of the scene’s action, but it also described some background elements. I know how helpful closed captions can be, so I could well imagine how this assistive technology would help a person who is blind.

So, that’s one of the features that state and local governments are expected to provide on websites and any third-party application software they use. Public colleges and universities must also comply. Private colleges and universities that receive federal funding should also offer such technologies.

Where things can get sticky is in the usage of third-party applications. The third party doesn’t necessarily have to meet these requirements, but the state or local government or college or university does. In other words, the state or local government or educational institution has to figure how to make the apps comply or work with the vendor to accomplish this.

The way that you and I interact with web content and mobile apps, whether we find them easy to use or not, is known as User Experience or UX. The irony of complying with web and app accessibility is that user experience can become clunky or unsatisfying.

If this sounds like a hassle and a headache, it surely must be. The consequences of compliance can have the effect of making a worse user experience.

One of the apps I regularly use hosts Buena Vista University’s digitized campus newspapers and alumni publications. While the app would never have rated a gold star as a stellar user experience, it worked well enough. A few updates over the years made it better.

A couple of weeks ago, though, the app suddenly looked completely different. Bright blue and green had replaced the more traditional landing page. When I tried to execute a search, it balked. I tried again and again and yet again several more times.

Finally, after waiting long, twitchy seconds, the page loaded, but trying to filter my search by a smaller date range proved equally annoying. It was like a horse who did not want to be ridden that day. Nope, no way, uh-uh. Neigh.

I put it down to an internet goblin that rears its head sometimes. It would get better, I reasoned. A few days later, a colleague in another department contacted me, expressing great displeasure as he was trying to use the app.

His unhappiness was enough to stir me to contact the vendor. “Why the change? This is pretty awful. Please roll back the changes.”

The changes could not be rolled back; they were done in the name of access compliance.

“The updated platform is designed to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA standards, the globally recognized benchmark for digital accessibility and ADA Title II compliance, and is built to work effectively with assistive technologies, support multiple methods of interaction and navigation, and improve overall readability, visibility, focus, and usability for all users.

These accessibility improvements benefit a broad range of users, including aging populations, individuals with temporary impairments, users navigating on mobile devices, and anyone who benefits from clearer and more flexible ways of interacting with digital content.”

OK, but why does the interface feel so bad to use, I asked. Everything felt awkward and difficult. The vendor admitted that there were kinks to work out, which seemed like an understatement.

Later, I happened to talk to a digital learning designer who works for the University of Minnesota. Let’s call them “Morris.” Morris said that if U of M’s learning tools aren’t compliant, it causes them no end of frustration.

Technical compliance (with the WCAG standards) and usability for people with (and without) disabilities are sometimes at loggerheads, Morris said. Features that many of us have come to love, like sliders (to increase size, for example) and drag-and-drop functionality, aren’t that easy to make accessible.

And if someone like Morris does manage to make them accessible, ease-of-use might suffer, which explained what was happening for me and my colleague at Buena Vista University.

For a while, I groused about these changes. It’s not the first time an app’s been updated when the changes felt like a backward step, but then I got a grip. Struggling with apps when you’re

1. colorblind or

2. prone to seizures or

3. ADHD and need a page free of distracting elements or

4. dyslexic and need to easily switch fonts to make letters clearer,

made me realize that a couple of days of frustration is nothing compared to what many students and adults with disabilities deal with on a daily basis.

Change is hard, and it’s going to be bumpy for Morris, who’s struggling to figure out how to balance compliance with usability; for vendors, who will need to step up their game and figure out how to do better by everyone; for people like me and my colleague, who will need to take a breath and be patient with the growing pains on the way to providing better access for everyone.

Many people know that former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was the mover and shaker behind the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. One of the bill’s features required that access to buildings be equitable for people with mobility challenges.

When I went to Europe in the 1990s, I was struck by all the cobblestones and uneven streets, narrow sidewalks, and steep, twisty staircases in old buildings. I remember wondering how disabled people were able to get around. I saw no wheelchairs then, but things seem to be improving with low-floor trains and trams and specially-outfitted taxis.

We think of the ADA as focused on access, and it is, but providing access is also a justice issue. For much of human history, people who couldn’t move under their own steam were at the mercy of others or worse, consigned to the shadows of human life.

Americans owe a lot to Tom Harkin’s work. In addition to making buildings more accessible, the ADA strives to make hiring practices more just. Much has been written about Harkin’s personal story that drove him to steer the ADA into being.

People may be less informed, however, about Universal Design and Access, which is not a law, but in many ways, a next logical step to the ADA. Universal Design seeks to create environments where people can continue to access facilities or services as their needs change.

Sometimes it’s a matter of incorporating a thoughtful adjustment that benefits everyone. When I was in Portland waiting to board the light rail, an extension slid out from the car’s doorway and allowed for step-free access from the platform. There was no need to “mind the gap” and I was thankful.

A parent with a stroller or a person in a wheelchair could easily enter. I noticed that not all stations were set up to work with this extension, but it was a joy when they did.

I don’t have mobility issues (yet), but I do have moderate hearing loss. To compensate, I wear hearing aids. They work great most of the time, except when public transportation loudspeakers are poor. When I’ve visited Chicago, I use the “L” a lot. Loudspeakers on many cars are terrible, and I can’t hear the next stop unless I look at the station when we slow down.

There have been occasions when I can’t see the sign because of where I’m sitting or where the car stops, but on some recent trips, there have been digital displays at the front of some cars. They clearly display the name of the stop, and it helps me—pardon the pun--stay on track. Not all “L” cars have this technology yet, but I’m sure I won’t be the only one happy to see them when they do.

When it comes to air travel, the sound system on airplanes can also be terrible. On a recent flight, I couldn’t hear anything the attendant said as people found their seats. This probably owed to the plane’s door being open and outside jet noises drowning her out.

Sometimes, however, I can’t hear what the pilot is saying while we’re cruising at 30-something-thousand feet. It would be nice to know what’s up! (Again, sorry for the pun.)

Some pilots are funny, and I can always use a laugh while penned inside a metal tube with 200 strangers. If the situation is far less than funny, I’d like to know that, too.

Of course, I can ask the person seated next to me, but should I have to? A digital display positioned at several intervals throughout the cabin would help people like me stay informed.

Time was many planes sported a seatback monitor. Wouldn’t it have been handy to see all that was being said on the seatback? The monitors were never put to such use, except to show a canned safety film, but that was a missed opportunity for us hearing-impaired folks.

It’s too late to make such a suggestion; seatback monitors are disappearing from most domestic flights. Techsciresearch.com says it’s one way to reduce the plane’s weight and make more room for passengers. Does this mean they will try to squish us in even more tightly?

I don’t call my hearing impairment a disability because I function at a high level in my work and personal life, but it has made me aware of the hurdles, nay, roadblocks that many face daily. I can’t imagine how frustrating it might be.

It doesn’t help that in our current political climate, we have a president who makes fun of people with disabilities and who calls fallen soldiers suckers and losers. He requires the veneer of perfection to function, but he’s no picture of perfection himself.

The backs of his hands are covered in makeup that tries (unsuccessfully) to hide bruises. He got off a plane recently and walked as if he were drunk. He wasn’t drunk because he’s famously a teetotaler, but it sure looked like he could have used some assistance for whatever was bothering him.

I wanted to say, “Hey, Mr. President! If you used a ramp today, thank Tom Harkin.” Harkin is, for me, the measure of a man because his work was guided not by seeking perfection but in practicing compassion. If we practiced more of that as a nation, such would make us a lot closer to great.

I.

Years ago, poet Linda Pastan wrote:

“Isn’t this what life

could be: a walk

before breakfast with the sea

opening its chapters

of water and light. . .”

It stirred up a longing I never knew I had. I’d never seen an ocean, never walked on an endless sandy beach. Oceans seemed mythical to this prairie kid.

And yet.

We were formed in water; we all started as little sea creatures, swimming in a self-contained ocean.

Our bodies are half water, and the pull toward bodies of water is strong.

The prairie was once a shallow, inland sea, and later a sea of grass.

What I’m saying is that the sea is in my blood. Yours, too.

II.

We are here, at the sea, on a beautiful coast. Five mothers and two daughters.

We are here, seven women who once all lived in the same small town, long scattered to coasts or lives far flung.

Though not of my blood, they are my sisters and mothers and aunties and daughters all the same.

We lived on the prairie once, in a place tilled and tiled and shorn of trees.

The flat horizon line afforded brilliant sunsets.

Here, we walk in a fragmented pack on skinny sidewalks past the deli and the wine bar, down to the water tumbling in on itself, to the sand pounded hard by time and tide.

III.

Here, too, exists a strong horizon line, but the sunsets are muted in a hazy scrim. Mist snags on the pines. We see life at the beach through a gauzy lens, but many things become clearer as we walk in the wind and the spray.

I step like a stork through the surge at water’s edge. I pick up small, dark stones, smooth as buttons.

There’s a whole world order happening here. Small shorebirds buzz the water’s edge in formation. Gulls confer with much bobbing and ducking before running headlong toward the water and lifting off.

The surf envelops my ankles, and my feet sink under the shifting sand.

IV.

We cook, we eat, we laugh, we gripe (a little). We are growing older.

In her poem, Pastan tries to imagine what would happen if she “refused to leave” the beach. That’s what hooked me many years ago, a longing for a different life with different rhythms.

We aren’t refusing to leave, we seven. We know our lives are waiting for us away from the beach.

We shake off the sand. We pack, we hug, we wave goodbye. Thank you, my sisters and mothers and aunties and daughters. I carry the prairie and the sea and you with me always.

I finally met Byron of Byron’s fame. You know, the quirky music venue in Pomeroy, a sleepy northwest Iowa town, like so many others, towns that once supported their own school systems and sports teams. They cultivated fierce rivalries with the towns next door.

Now, they are hanging on to whatever vestiges of identity they can, remembering a lost era when storefronts were occupied and people could—and did—shop locally.

I grew up in a town very much like Pomeroy. I know such towns, but none of them have a Byron’s. You must want to go to get there. This was a fact noted by members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative who descended on Storm Lake last week for their spring meeting.

One IWC friend from Des Moines marveled at how we, in northwest Iowa, drive 45 minutes for all kinds of reasons. “We complain if we have to drive to Ankeny,” she said.

Here’s what I’ve noticed, though. People in cities spend nearly as much time getting to sporting events and shopping centers as rural people do. They may drive shorter distances, but they have other negotiations that take time: traffic, parking, and waiting in line. They have density; we have distance.

On the way to Pomeroy, I tried to envision what my friends were thinking as they drove along Highway 7. This is a beautiful time of year. Fields are plowed, their rich, black soil seems full of promise. On the surface, all looks well, but my friend Jim Sayers rightly notes that those fields remind him “of the significant challenges we face to preserve soil and its health.”

The land is flat and open, featureless almost. How does that register with someone like my friend, Bob, who used to live on an acreage in southeast Iowa, with hills and trees.

Or my friend, Connie from Des Moines who asked what people do if they need milk at 9 pm. In a word: Casey’s.

What do they see when they roll through Newell, where once the Good Samaritan Center offered nursing care and jobs? Or Fonda, with its ball fields and swimming pool set back from the highway? Do they see quaint Americana or a foreign, fading way of life? A way of life that’s interesting to pass through and say you’ve been there, done that?

On that 45-minute drive to Pomeroy, I only met a handful of cars. For me, this is normal, but what does it feel like for someone from Des Moines? Eerie, perhaps? Otherworldly?

I pulled up not far from the front door and walked right in. I was handed a raffle ticket and a multi-colored plastic peace symbol. Groovy.

Walking back from the bar with my Coke in a can (only a buck!!!), I saw Byron perched on a stool. I extended my hand; he opened his arms, and then I knew that everything that’s been said or written about the man and this place was true.

I arrived late for the first set but caught some of Jason Walsmith’s act. He was performing solo, but you may know him as a member of The Nadas. Dartanyan Brown followed with his vocal stylings. Carol Montag’s voice recalled Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins for me, and she sang hilarious songs about Jello and Velveeta.

John Naughton walked in about then and sat at our table. He carried two ukuleles. I’m fascinated by that instrument; learning to play is on my retirement bucket list.

In between sets, Byron pulled tickets and announced raffle winners. Among the prizes: a back scratcher, a pocketknife, photos of that night’s musicians, and a Bic lighter. The winner of the backscratcher said he would add it to his collection. Obviously, he’s a Byron’s regular.

Then the second set started with Chip Albright and his new song about Josh Turek’s candidacy to replace Joni Ernst in the US Senate. I couldn’t stay for Lyle Muller’s round, sadly, and I’m still curious about what happened with those ukuleles.

Art Cullen and I got to share our little corner of the world for a couple of days with good friends, good conversation, and good music. And I finally made it to Byron’s.

It’s delightfully down-home, where all are welcome. Byron’s is the way the world should be.

Shame on me for waiting so long.

“What a world, what a world,” cried the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. We can utter that same cry every day, every day.

What kind of a world is it where a president and his minions work to undo all that makes America, America?

I’m talking threats to the Constitution, the 14^th Amendment, the 19^th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and one of my personal favorites, the Presidential Records Act.

Prior to Richard Nixon’s presidency, United States presidents were allowed to remove documents they created during their terms and claim them as personal property.

In 1934, the United States Congress established its first ever national archives. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the law for the National Archives to serve as a centralized, federal repository for the government’s documentary heritage.

Previously, federal records had literally been stashed “wherever” and depending on where the “wherever” was, rodents might have eaten documents or leaky roofs might have stained and blurred the writing. Mold could have set in and spread to unaffected documents. Yes, a National Archives was long overdue.

FDR also “believed presidential papers were an important part of the national heritage and should be preserved for future generations”1 but that each president, rather than overwhelming the National Archives, should agree to establish their own presidential library but make the documents available for public use.

In 1938, FDR planned for the first-ever presidential library, where he would later deposit “50 million items, including 16,000 books, 15,000 photographs, 275,000 feet (84,000 m) of movie film, and 300 sound recordings.”2

FDR’s successors also built presidential libraries with private funds that were managed by what was then called the National Archives and Records Service (NARS).3 In 1955 Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act allowing presidential documents and memorabilia to be transferred to the archives.

A little over a decade later Richard Nixon and Watergate happened. After Nixon left office in 1974, Congress decreed that Nixon’s papers (including White House recordings, of course) were to be seized and transferred to the National Archives.

In 1978 Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA) which “changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and subsequently NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations.”4

I have written about the current president’s disregard for this legislation

before. In case you’ve forgotten, he took a heap of boxes with him to Florida after his first term, claiming they were personal property, but they were not. They included classified information, which he showed to guests at Mar-a-lago--people who had no security clearance to view such documents.

Some of those boxes have been returned to the government, but many still remain in unsecured areas at his Florida residence. Special Counsel Jack Smith investigated these documents and wrote a report, which remains under seal by Judge Aileen Cannon. Smith has testified twice, once in closed session and once in public, about this case.

After the president fired the National Archivist, Colleen Shogan in February 2025, the archivists at NARA were left to serve under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio was appointed as Acting Head of the National Archives, but he knew bupkis about the profession. His 300-day term recently expired, and NARA employees are left wondering what comes next.

What’s not likely to come next are the boxes from Mar-a-lago. On April 1—no fooling—the Department of Justice issued a memo—a memo--that the Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional and that the president really doesn’t have to turn over his records when he leaves office after his second term.

The American Historical Association and American Oversight have both sued to dispute this opinion. Because it’s ridiculous. It’s a memo.

Historian Joanne Freeman states that the DOJ’s memo violates the separation of powers. “What we’re talking about is [a] public record that is OURS, and that is how we understand the history of presidencies.”

We can see what the endgame is, of course. 45/47 doesn’t want the public seeing these records. He doesn’t want us to know what he did in his first term, but as Freeman pointed out, destroying or hiding records “is not how noncorrupt regimes function.”

Indeed they do not. I follow all of this with great interest because it is my profession, sure, but how do we—you, me, all of us--know our history unless we have the facts? Yeah, right now, the facts of who we are sucks, but that’s why it’s even more important that we retain our documentary heritage, so that down the road we don’t lie and so that we don’t forget.

Saving the Nixon tapes helped topple a corrupt presidency. We need the boxes from Mar-a-lago, and we need the rest of the Epstein files.

I’m tired of being held hostage. Aren’t you? This guy, bulldozing democracy with the same unconcern that he ravaged East Wing, says we have plenty of our own oil. In one breath, he says that we don’t need oil from the Middle East, and in the next, he threatens to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.

This same inflammatory statement uttered by the president riled my fellow columnist-friend Art Cullen in his April 6, 2026 column, “The Fred Flintstone Doctrine in the Middle East.” That Stone Age reference made Cullen think about the cartoonish nature of the man in charge and his buffoonish administration. For me, it’s more like life in America has become a Pennywise nightmare.

The president’s posturing is a joke, except it isn’t.

It’s not funny that he sends a message to a centuries-old civilization saying, in effect, “I will annihilate you.” It’s not funny that he threatens a religious-extremist government that he does not understand. It’s not funny that, in one breath, he makes threats in the name of God, and in another breath, in the name of Allah.

It’s not funny that he and his Department of Defense Secretary equate God’s name with “lethality” and bandy about the idea of massive slaughter. They want to scorch the earth so that those who survive will wish they were dead.

45/47 wants to dehumanize Iranian citizens, to reduce them to scratching in the dirt, just like he wanted to dehumanize the Obamas with that monkey meme. Just like he wanted to dehumanize the protesters of No Kings II with the airplane dumping liquid poop in that tasteless cartoon.

What sort of person does such things?

An old phrase, “cock of the walk,” comes to mind. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a man who is too confident and thinks he is better than everyone else.” A definition which recalls the cartoon character, Foghorn Leghorn, who thought he ruled the roost that is, I say, that is until the Barnyard Dawg gave him a good whoopin’.

Where’s our Barnyard Dawg? Congress? That’s a joke, son.

Shucks, Art was right, as usual, going for the cartoon angle of this wacky—but dangerous--scenario. He went for Hanna-Barbera; I went for Looney Tunes.

Oh, how I wish we were all watching 45/47 wave goodbye, saying, “That’s all, folks!”

Yo, nerd alert!

I loved studying poetry and literature in college.

I’m grateful to have been educated in an era when such things were valued. I work at Buena Vista University and in my job as archivist, it was a joy to discover that one of our past presidents highly regarded the liberal arts. Years ago, Keith Briscoe wrote captains of industry to ask their thoughts about hiring such majors.

The corporate presidents who responded to Briscoe said they would welcome a well-read, articulate young person in the world of business. Those responses occurred at the twilight of the liberal arts, just as technology was about to burst into everyone’s life with desktop computers, followed by the internet.

In its time, my alma mater--a small, private college not unlike BVU--had a robust English department. At the end of the 2022-2023 academic year a student could no longer major in literature there. Many of us English alumni mourned.

Big deal!

Good riddance!

What a worthless major!

“You want fries with that?”

Today, students and their parents expect career preparation in college because that’s what the world now demands. One of the results is that students read far less.

They still read, but it’s likely to be something light or texts from friends or family. And they watch posts and videos from influencers who draw them in. “Come see my life. Look upon your own and despair.”

We humans are wired to look, to always look for something beyond this finite entity called the self, to fill the void. Lighting on an image is a siren call. It draws us in.

Words, on the other hand, are work. Our brain must conjure the image. Big words and new thoughts are hard work. Big words can make us angry. We don’t want to wrestle with a story that demands concentration. We don’t want to trip over words we’ve never seen before. We don’t want to grapple with foreign ideas.

I want to say to young people: When so confronted, stay with it. Enter the dark forest of the daunting syllabus. Cut through the thicket of hundreds of required pages. It’s easier than ever to look up a strange word. You don’t even have to get out of your chair.

You just might be transformed along the way. You might emerge from the difficult class a new creature, seeing the world as though for the first time. Take a chance!

This can be a lot to ask the risk-averse young, and I sympathize. I was not one of those can-do type kids. I was riddled with self-doubt and had almost no self-confidence. My only saving grace was that I had a deep hunger to learn. And that, like Robert Frost’s fork in the road, made all the difference.

Let’s just say it, shall we? Technology is a devil. It is smooth and cool and easy in ways that wading through a text can never be.

It’s not that I or my peers were better. We were just deprived of that particular devil. We were thrown back on our own devices.

What an ironic turn of phrase.

In our day, being thrown back on our own devices meant hanging out, screwing around, getting into a little trouble. It meant climbing things like arches and flag poles and cramming a dozen people into a Volkswagen Beetle.

I often marvel that we had so much time to write letters, build Homecoming floats, sew clothing, can food. Days stretched out for what seemed like, well, days. But now, we too have given our souls to that devil. We throw ourselves at our devices just like the kids do.

Now, we descend rabbit holes that lead to underground cities. When we resurface, a whole afternoon has vaporized in a haze of perfect families on perfect vacations. What remains is a tech hangover and a pounding case of envy.

For me, a green goo attaches to my organs, and failure coats my tongue. I look around and all I see is a ratty couch and a ratty dog. I am a person under the influence of the image.

Some of this is not new; we are always being influenced. My grandmother listened to Kitchen Klatter, which told her how to bake a perfect cake. My mother had Better Homes and Gardens’ glossy photos of perfectly glazed hams. Seventeen magazine’s layouts showed perfectly coiffed girls with perfectly straight smiles.

Honestly, one might argue that writers are influencers, too, but I didn’t hate my life after reading Madame Bovary or The Old Man and the Sea. I was entertained, transported even. An alchemy occurred, whose origin was murky and whose end might remain hidden for years.

I was still me but also not me. I was enlarged in ways one might not detect but that were real nonetheless. It was an experience devoid of monetization and followers. There was no algorithm to judge my success at being human.

Thankfully, I’ve learned that the green goo can be shed with fortitude. I lift my eyes to what’s real. My couch is comfortable; it just needs a throw, and my dog is loving; he just needs a haircut. What’s more, the sunset is glorious, and the trees are starting to bud.

When I see young people bent over their phones, I don’t blame them, but I mourn the loss of their youth and hopefulness and how a devil took it.

I grew up walking or biking everywhere as a kid. There was nowhere to go and little to do in a town like Hospers, Iowa. You could start from Highland Avenue, where I lived on the northern edge, and bike to the ballfield on the southern edge in 15 minutes without really trying.

Most of us townies walked to the elementary school, which we attended from first through third grade. After that, we rode the school bus to Newkirk or Alton, the other sites in the Floyd Valley School District.

This was a change from a few years earlier. My older brother attended school in our hometown through the eighth grade. He played trombone and swears that hauling that heavy case for six blocks back and forth each day wrecked his posture.

The point is, we walked. We hugged our books to our chests. Later on, we got bookbags, but we walked. Perhaps this is why walking seems to be in my blood, yet my parents weren’t big walkers. They always rode in dad’s pickup to the hardware store, and they never took an evening stroll. They were too tired from being on their feet all day, but I get a little antsy if I’m visiting somewhere and don’t stretch my legs after a sedentary day.

Once, on a trip to Minneapolis, after my parents checked into the motel quite late, I said I was going for a walk. “You are NOT! This is a big city. Somebody could get you.” This is how small-town I was, how safe my world was. The thought of walking alone at night was natural, not dangerous, to me.

For a short time, I lived on the south end of Bellingham, Washington, and walked to the Albertson’s at the bottom of the hill. On days off, I walked downtown or to the Fairhaven district. I had a car, which I drove to work at the north edge of town, but I much preferred my jaunts on foot. It was the best way to learn about a different part of the country and to drink in sweeping views of Bellingham Bay.

So, when I think about moving closer to the Grands, my first thought is, I’d want to live in a place where it is safe to walk. This doesn’t seem like much to ask, particularly if you live in the ‘burbs, but I’m not a ‘burb kind of gal. I want to walk to a coffee shop or a restaurant, an Aldi’s, a pharmacy, or the doctor. And, for too many of us, this is more than a big ask. It’s impossible.

Part of the joy of living close to downtown Storm Lake is that I can walk to a few favorite restaurants, and I can walk or bike to work. I am a couple of blocks away from the lake and the lake trail. Until the drive-up pharmacy closed, I could nip over--on foot--during my lunch hour and fill a prescription.

Do you live in a place where this is possible, where your basic needs could be met—on foot or by bike—in a 15-minute radius from your home? There are fancy terms for this concept like “human-centered planning” or “urban mobility,” but I call it living on a human scale.

For me, of course, it harks back to the way I grew up. Increasingly, I realize that this is a privilege few enjoy anymore. Am I the only one who thinks this is strange and even wrong?

Maybe. Someone once told me there are “light people” and “heavy people.” Light people can move away from a place and not look back. Heavy people become part of a place and find it hard to leave. “You’re heavy,” they said, and I should have replied, “I’m an anchor stuck deep in the sea floor.”

So, I carry this romantic notion of wanting to live like I’m in a European city. I carry it around like a dirty secret, but why should it be so? I know that other people have experienced this kind of delight, too. They talk about how good it feels not to dodge cars while crossing a street or having to rely on a car for everything.

Many parts of Storm Lake can be enjoyed like that. Storm Lake Times Pilot publisher John Cullen wrote about adopting a walking habit, and he talked about the virtues of keeping fit, bumping into people, and noticing flora and fauna.

In other words, walking can bring us back to ourselves, but it can also draw us out of ourselves. When I first moved here, the dog and I headed to the lake every day after work, and the sight of the moving water, which was (and is) different every time, lifted me.

That’s why the 15-minute town idea has such appeal. There are critics, of course, who say that it’s just another form of gentrification. There is that danger. If there’s no mixed housing, if it’s just creating another homogenous form of the suburbs, then no thanks. I live amongst people from all over the world, and I would hate to lose the richness of what they bring to my life.

Conspiracy theorists, however, see the 15-minute town concept as totalitarianism, which is really a stretch. The implication, best I can tell, is that they see walkability as restricting freedom and the ability to “get away.” They’re equating driving with an inalienable right or treating it like a shadow amendment: “You can pry my steering wheel out of my cold, dead hands.”

No one is taking away your license or your car. Some of us, however, want to retain our mobility well into our twilight years. Walking can stave off or mitigate a host of physical problems.

Really, given the giant leap in gas prices—and who knows how much higher they might go—do these naysayers really think they are free while paying $4.00 a gallon?

Silly me. I thought it was Jared Moskowitz who got Kristi Noem fired.

You know Jared Moskowitz, don’t you? He’s the Florida Democratic representative who, in February, asked Pam Bondi what she had written about him in her “burn book.” Bondi, as you may recall, appeared before a House Judiciary Committee, and in preparation, she (or more likely, staffers) wrote insults that she could hurl at committee members instead of answering questions.

From the moment that Bondi sneered and Moskowitz smiled, though, I went to Jared. This administration is a mockery of truth and justice of the first order. He mocks their mockery and in so doing, reminds us how heinous they really are. He can deflate all their sound and fury which signifies nothing. He knows just how to skewer their vainglory and reveal it for the ridiculousness it is.

So, when Kristi Noem appeared last week before that self-same committee, I clapped to learn that Moskowitz wore a “Justice for Cricket” button to the proceedings. Cricket was Noem’s dog until Noem shot Cricket for being a puppy doing puppy things.

Moskowitz later brought up the incident where Noem fired a pilot for forgetting her special blanket on an airplane. In honor of that traumatic incident, Moskowitz gave Noem a parting gift: “I got you a new Coast Guard blankie, the one you lost. So this is for you, you don’t leave empty-handed...”

Insert chef’s kiss. See what I mean about mocking and skewering?

Although, I sort of get the furor over the lost banket. If you’re a child (or uber-childish), a lost blanket is cause for concern. When I tried to get one of my grandsons to take a nap, he kept demanding the “Mickey binkit,” and he would not settle down without it.

I understood. I used to have a special “binkit” too. I called it my “Dee-Dee,” and I hauled it everywhere, but sadly, it got left behind in a Colorado hotel on family vacation.

So, wasn’t it nice of Representative Moskowitz to secure Noem a new blanket? I never got a new “Dee-Dee.” Four-year-old me had to carry on without it, miles from home.

Of course, for Noem, a grown woman, being given a new blanket caused some titters among the committee, and it was delicious to behold. Moskowitz certainly has a way of bringing sunshine to some awful occasions, and it makes me think more kindly about Florida.

So, the next day, when news broke that Noem was being replaced, I thought it was because of Jared Moskowitz. We’ve all been told how 45/47 despises being made fun of. He’s never gotten over being the butt of Obama’s jokes, for example.

But that wasn’t it at all.

The pundits say it had to do with Louisiana Senator John Kennedy’s questions about Noem’s outrageous spending on an ad campaign.

But there are variations in why that brought her tenure to an end. As if spending $220 million for cheesy ads wasn’t bad enough.

Some said it was because she threw the president under the bus, explaining that he had approved the expenditure. The president said he had not. She made him look bad, and that seemed like a good enough reason (at least to some) to fire her.

Author, teacher, and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said it was because of the ads themselves. Noem was in her native state, on horseback, with Mount Rushmore in the background, hogging the spotlight, in the very location where 45/47 wants his face blasted onto the rocks.

Journalist Jonathan V. Last said that the reason was that 45/47 had not been given a cut of Noem’s action. She paid all kinds of cronies in the production of the ads, but she didn’t share with the Big Cheese.

A few minutes later, Last and White House Correspondent Andrew Egger surmised a far knottier reason. They suggested that Senator Kennedy had been coached by Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.

They posited that, given Miller’s well-known antipathy to Noem, he wanted Kennedy to ask about the ad campaign to make her look bad. In other words, this strategy would provide the way to get the president to finally get rid of a very problematic person.

I would never make it as a pundit. My mind would short-circuit trying to conceive of so many machinations and contortions. Moreover, does 45/47 really have to have a monetary slice of everything, everywhere, all at once?

Silly me. Of course, he does. How could I forget?

How could I forget the chief lesson Deepthroat gave Woodward and Bernstein while investigating Watergate: Follow the money. Always, follow the money.

Especially with this president.

But I would have much preferred to follow the satire instead. It made me feel so much better to laugh with Jared Moskowitz than to learn, yet again, that this is not a presidency. This is a bilking operation of massive—nay, epic—proportions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the very rich “are different from you and me.” While that quote comes from a short story, his novel, The Great Gatsby, fully embodies that observation.

We don’t live in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age. The very rich are now tech bros, yet another magnitude of different. They want to live forever; they construct escape bunkers; they want to live on Mars.

They have no scruples about hooking us and our children into endless scrolling, causing us to make futile comparisons to unreal and unrealistic images.

They are among the most anti-democratic souls on the planet.

It is not in their nature to reflect on cause and effect. They see an opportunity—not even a problem—that technology can fill. They do not ask if it’s needful. They do not look beyond the techno-marvel of it all.

They are filled with hubris. They do not ask about the human cost, and their anti-humanity chills me to the core.

Let us first turn to Elon Musk, deposed doer of DOGE, CEO of X (formerly Twitter), dabbler in space exploration, desirer of colonizing Mars.

A few months ago, Musk told an interviewer that he envisions X as a kind of collective consciousness.

He said he didn’t want X to be a source of endless dopamine hits, but he was being disingenous. The kind of dreck that fuels outrage and endless clicks and doomscrolling on such a platform encourages addictive behavior.

The interviewer then asked a simple question. “And why is that important, Elon? Collective consciousness, to have on one platform?”

Elon paused, stuttered a bit. It was like watching your computer buffer and sputter, and then said: “Yeah, why is that important?”

The man who wants all thought gathered into one spot had no answer to a fundamental question. It was a delicious emperor-has-no-clothes moment.

Business and leadership guru Simon Sinek says that the real measure of success is knowing your “why.”

Musk had no “why” for his ambition.

After stumbling around a bit, he said, “I guess it’s so we can increase our understanding of the universe.”

And you, Elon Musk, guess that you want to control that. You, who have grand designs for mind and knowledge domination, yet you don’t know why you desire that. Reader, does this not strike fear in your heart?

Let’s turn next to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. When asked about the cost of building artificial intelligence, he responded:

“One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is that people always talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model relative to how much it costs one human to do an inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

If you needed any more evidence of how unlike the very rich tech bros are from you and me, here is the pièce de rèsistance.

Sam Altman would rather spend $100 million on Chat GPT4 than feed, clothe, and educate any single one of us.

What Sam Altman thinks about the costs of “training” a human life is a universe of difference to the value of a weekend spent singing to my one-month-old granddaughter and playing monster trucks with her big brother.

So let’s ask ourselves: What should the role of technology be in our lives? I joke, more and more often, that it might be time to get out the typewriter and sign up for a landline. It’s easy to forget that those are modes of technology, too, and their appearance disrupted ways of existence, and they also cost people jobs.

They also made communication easier and faster. It’s a human desire to make things better, to innovate.

Did the innovations also make us less human? That seems to be a question worth asking, especially now. Staying human in the face of so much inhumanity can seem insurmountable.

Recently, I visited a friend who was widowed after a long and happy marriage. Her grief is natural and just, and I felt honored that she shared her pain with me. As we ate lunch one day, she wondered aloud: What is this life for? What is it all about?

I could tell her without hesitation that the value of her life was that she loved her husband and her children and her grandchildren. That love has been carried into the world, and there was nothing more important than that.

This treasure of a life, this life right here, right now, of wiping noses and butts and laughing and crying, and sending the kids to school and into lives of their own is worth everything. If the very rich don’t know that, they and their AI know nothing.

Let’s return to Fitzgerald and more thoughts about the very rich. They

“think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

In the face of those who devalue our lives because we aren’t rich tech bros, because we must be fed and attended to in all of our messiness, we must resist what they are selling. We must fight to stay human. It may be the battle of our lives.

I hang up the phone, and it hits me again. Even with certain limitations on my time and wallet, I enjoy a lot of privilege in life.

The person I spoke with is an alumnus of my workplace, Buena Vista University, and he was calling from two states east, where he lived both before and after attending BV.

When he came to school in the 1960s, he rode the Illinois Central right into town. (If you, like me, hear strains of “City of New Orleans” in your head--only because it mentions that railroad—you’re welcome.)

I try to imagine a young man leaving everything and stepping off the train with a suitcase (or two) and starting college in a place where nobody knows him. What an adventure.

My own train dreams took me from Omaha to Seattle on Amtrak’s California Zephyr and the Empire Builder from Seattle to Minneapolis on the way back. Not because I had to but because I wanted to.

Thanks to the power of advertising, train travel seemed romantic. Without a sleeper car, however, by the third day, the romance was gone. Still, that trip in the 1980s scratched the “see America by rail” itch and back then, it was affordable. I was just out of college and had no credit card.

For Mr. X from a Midwestern state, the train was the only way he could get to school. He didn’t drive and he never has. There are people in the world who cannot or will not drive, a fact I often forget.

He would visit campus more often because he has a deep love for our school, but the train stopped running before he graduated. Greyhound was the next best thing, which if you’ve ever taken one, that might make you laugh.

You’ll remember the racing dog painted on the side of the bus. Again, advertising at its most disingenuous. There is a reason folk singer Harry Chapin called it a “dog of a way to get around.”

Like a dog, it would trot here and there, stopping at little towns all along a route. For people with less means—or no car--it provided a way to get around. For Mr. X, the bus would get him to Storm Lake and within striding distance of campus, until that, too, stopped.

In college, I once boarded a Greyhound in Hospers, Iowa, on a summer Sunday morning and rode it to Minneapolis. It was a long hot bus ride, and it took all day, rather than the usual four hours by car.

None of my trips on public transportation were necessities, and that’s what I mean about privilege. My life and livelihood did not depend on those modes of getting around.

For Mr. X, the closest he can get to Storm Lake now is a bus stop in Fort Dodge, and because he doesn’t drive, that isn’t close enough. The bus doesn’t come anywhere near Hospers anymore, either.

People with heaps of privilege may wonder what the fuss is about. “Get a car, and get on with it!” As if it’s so easy for someone with health challenges or little means.

We, the privileged, whizz by and don’t give our mobility a second thought.

In her book, Paper Girl, author Beth Macy travels to her Ohio hometown to find the world she once knew long gone. Rampant social problems and NAFTA eroded the fabric of a once-vital manufacturing town. Its young people are beset with adult problems and few resources to assist them toward a better life.

Macy follows a few teenagers who yearn for more education following high school, but getting to the nearby community college is itself a big hurdle. One girl has no car but determines to ride her bike 20 miles (one way) every day--even in winter--until a teacher points out the improbability of that.

One young man starts his classes, but immediately his car dies, and he has no money to replace his wheels. Coupled with a family emergency, he drops out in the first weeks of the term.

How much harder do these kids have to have it, I wonder. How much longer are legislators and fat cats going to haul out the old saw about bootstrap pulling when cruelty and lack of understanding have cut those frayed ends long ago.

For her part, author Macy also came from a hardscrabble existence and knew firsthand “how much a crap car limited a rural kid’s ability to improve their lot.”

She had to work her tail off for everything she had, but she had one advantage that the current crop of kids in her hometown don’t. She received a Pell grant that paid for her schooling, her room and board, and her books.

It was the difference that gave her a chance in life, a chance she would never have had otherwise. Without such chances, Macy “recognized the unprecedented forces that were actively turning the community [she] loved into a poorer, sicker, angrier, and less educated place.”

Today’s Pell grant doesn’t come close to filling the bill. The maximum award for the current academic year is $7395. That’s less than $3700 per semester.

Base tuition at Iowa’s regent universities is $9,852 at University of Iowa, $9,816 at Iowa State University, and $9,054 at University of Northern Iowa.

There are loans, you say? Sure, but what if, like the kids Macy met, you can’t get from Point A to Point B to begin with? What if you can’t afford a car loan? What if, for whatever reason, you don’t (or are unable to) have a driver’s license?

Most of us take getting a car, getting an education, building a life, so for granted, but poverty makes the slightest movements toward a better life seem insurmountable.

The way towns and cities are planned (I would argue NOT planned), you are screwed if you don’t have access to public transportation.

Once upon a time, you could get to Storm Lake from two states away without a car, but that was long ago in a world far, far away and gone.

As a kid I used to watch ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” on winter Saturday afternoons. This was the era when stores were open long hours, the day of the week when farmers and their families came to town to shop and socialize.

My parents often put in twelve-hour workdays on Saturdays, so for me, a latchkey kid, winter Saturday afternoons were dead boring. I’d already been to Zwagerman Hardware for a few hours and futzed around in the toy aisle. I leafed through the Reader’s Digest and McCall’s that my mom kept under the office counter. I was getting too old to hang out at grandma’s.

So, I headed home and turned on the TV and became friends with Jim McKay and the triumphant theme music as they spanned the globe looking for the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat!” Every week, viewers watched some poor athlete wipe out on a ski jump descent and careen off the platform.

That ski jumping, though. As much as I loved ice skating, ski jumping seemed like the most terrifying, yet thrilling, dare-devil sport a person could do. Hang gliding hadn’t become popular yet, so watching a human zoom down a slope and take wing was the closest thing to human flight without a motor. Up, up, and away, and no beautiful balloon.

Today, ski jumping looks nothing like it did in my childhood. Back then, it was an open slope, which, if you fell, you became immortal, remembered for a spectacular wipeout that would replay forever. (See above.) Now, the run is bounded by steps and the athlete’s skis fit into tightly proscribed tracks. It seems so calculated, so sealed off from the wild danger of it all.

I remember when ski jumpers figured out that widening their skis tips into a V-shape would enhance aerodynamics. That was a big innovation, delivering up to 30% more lift. Seems like they should have figured that out sooner than the late 1980s. It’s physics, yo.

More recent “developments” are shrouded in controversy. This year some ski jumpers are participating in a weird sort of doping. Some reports say that male athletes are enhancing their nether regions with injections. Other reports debunk this. You decide, but male athletes have been known to “pack” the crotches of their suits for performance enhancement.

Apparently, a greater surface area in that region helps the aerodynamics. Huh.

What I’m more focused on is the fact that in all those years of watching ski jumping I never once—not once—asked, “Why are there no women in this sport?” Well, women were jumping, and they were asking to participate, but they weren’t allowed at elite levels.

As late as 2005—2005!!!—according to Time magazine, a member of the International Olympic Committee—a man--“said he didn’t think women should ski jump because the sport ‘seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.’ “

Thankfully, women were finally allowed to compete in the Olympics at the 2014 games in Sochi, Russia.

But the “women are too delicate” to run/walk/fight/ski jump argument should have been put to rest decades and decades ago. It’s the same argument that was made when six-on-six basketball was devised—by men.

Now, I know I am on very thin ice, throwing shade on a hallowed Iowa institution. People wax poetic about the halcyon days of six-on-six, but it was born in sexism, it reigned in sexism, and it remains entrenched in sexism, along with people’s memories.

One of the Des Moines Register’s most read, and sometimes most reviled columnists, Donald Kaul, was famous for skewering the pace of the game, saying it was “like waiting for a bus, only with cheerleaders,” but he missed the real point.

We shortchanged our sisters and daughters. We hobbled some female athletes in being prepared for collegiate basketball. Who knows how many forerunners for Caitlin Clark never developed because they were constrained to half-court.

Institutional inertia and the fans kept coming back for six-on-six when we knew full well that women could run and jump and shoot beyond the limits that were set. To date, not one uterus has dropped out of a female running full court.

Nostalgia has a place, but we should also examine whether that nostalgia continues to be earned. Lord knows I can be nostalgic for the wrong things, too. Bugs Bunny cartoons now astonish me with their sexist AND racist tropes. Sometimes nostalgia blinds us and excuses oppression.

Please understand: None of this comes from a place of bitterness. I was tall, but I never played basketball. Never wanted to, and I never looked at six-on-six with derision in my youth.

But now, I am dumbfounded that we continue to wax rhapsodic over a tradition that made competent young women play by rules forged by men who judged them “less than.”

I have more to say on sexism in sports and the Olympics, but for now, please send all hate mail to: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500.

Grandchild Number Three arrived in dramatic fashion--on greased skids, as it were. That baby wasted no time barreling into the world two weeks early. Talk about speedy delivery, but everyone is doing well.

The baby’s arrival meant that Grand One and I got to spend a lot of time together, which included nap and bedtimes. This child does not want to miss a minute of life, so sleeping sometimes feels like something to be shunned until it can be shunned no more.

I have visited often enough to know how taxing it is for GO’s parents to induce somnolence in their firstborn. Reading quietly, dimming the lights, putting on white noise, darkening the room, should all set a stage for lulling this kid to sleep.

But, no. Not really. Nope.

So, I had trepidation going into the first night with this child. GO is bright and full of “rizz” and as my daughter and son-in-law would say, “heckin’ cute.” (They’re right.) But not always a good sleeper.

In my own child-rearing adventures, I had one good sleeper and one who was like Grand One. The one who was not a good sleeper learned to vault himself out of his crib at 18 months. It’s too bad Iowa high schools stopped offering pole vault as a field event. He would have been a star. Scholarship material, even.

In facing the challenge of bedtime with Grand One, my daughter and son-in-law gave me some strategies, and I was grateful for the tips. I also told myself that this could well be a marathon event, so settle in.

I gotta hand it to my family. They’ve made this child a lover of books at an early age, but kids are smart. They learn to work the angles before their parents catch on so at naptime a three-book limit is in force, and at bedtime, the limit is upped to five.

That first night, I read four books, and then I signaled the five-book warning. The reading light was extinguished, and “Oma” (that’s me) lay down on the floor next to the crib.

“He’ll want to hold hands through the crib slats,” my daughter had advised. And so he did. There are those moments. You know the ones. A look between two people that says everything that needs to be said. A word of encouragement that helps you break through the fog of self-doubt. Well, that little hand in mine was such a moment. He will never remember it, but I certainly will.

Ten minutes, readers. Maybe twelve, and Grand One was asleep.

Did I keep this accomplishment to myself? I did not. My daughter and son-in-law were probably trying to sleep back in the hospital with the newborn, but I had to brag.

“Just call me the toddler whisperer!” I texted.

“Can you move in?” my daughter asked.

“Beginner’s luck,” I replied.

The next day, at naptime, I held my breath. Was I a one-hit wonder? A one-trick pony? Grand One was a bit more restless than the previous night, so after the three books were read, I once again lay down. Minutes passed. Rustling around in the crib. Little murmurings. More rustling.

I could try singing, I thought. During daytime hours, his other grandma and I often sing him all the childhood standards, “The Wheels on the Bus,” “Old McDonald,” “Three Blind Mice” ad infinitum, but none of those seemed like good choices for helping a child slip into dreamland.

While Grand One was still in utero, I’d stumbled onto a song on Youtube: “Irish Eyes.” I’m not Irish at all, at all. Not one speck, but I like the song, and I’d sung it to Grand One in his first months of life. It seemed like a good time to trot it out again.

“My mother says I have Irish eyes, Irish eyes, Irish eyes. . .”

“More,” he said when I finished.

“More.”

So, a few times more with the Irish eyes and the English hair and the traveling feet and the restless soul, and he fell asleep.

The second night, though, I could tell that the novelty of me was already fading, so when he thrashed about, I began to sing “Irish Eyes” again.

Again, he clamored for more. The kid is stalling, I thought, but I obliged. Many, many times I obliged.

Some people have written their own verses to this song, to reflect their own heritage, and I was starting to wish I had thought to craft some specific to my roots.

“My mother says I have wooden shoes, wooden shoes, wooden shoes. . .”

He finally quieted down.

All this singing made me remember the weird choices I made when Grand One’s mommy was a baby.

When I changed her diaper I sang, “My Romance” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I don’t know why.

When she was older, I sang her show tunes, focusing, on “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No” from “Oklahoma” until I realized that I was sending the wrong message. Thankfully, she never picked up the tune or the lyrics. Rodgers and Hammerstein are pretty sophisticated, and that song would have been a definite no-no with my Calvinist relatives.

I’m currently trying to learn the lyrics to “The Swimming Song” because it’s fun, and it would lend itself to actions. Kids like action songs, although during pre-nap story time, when I stood and tried to act out part of a dinosaur book, Grand One cut me off.

“Sit!” he said.

Kids know what they like, and that wasn’t it.

But my singing must have passed muster. I’ll take it as a win.

I used to read like a house on fire. Then cable TV appeared, and the banquet of classic movies lured me in.

The internet continued to diminish my once-robust reading habit, and social media swallowed gobs of life I’ll never get back.

To top it off, “The Pause” shot further holes in my attention span. Who knew that a 350-page book could function as a sleeping pill for a woman of a certain age?

Now that I’m driving across the state “on the regular” to visit kids and grandbabies, I’m listening to books, and thankfully, that doesn’t put me to sleep. It also helps break up the long stretches of open country on Highway 20.

People like to debate that listening to an audiobook is not reading, and technically, they are correct, but since the dawn of time before ANYONE could read, people sat around a fire and listened to stories.

Years ago, I read Walter Ong’s book, “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,” which is a great read. Listening is not reading per se, but I know several couples who read to each other, and for me, that’s the perfect marriage between orality and literacy. For the sake of argument (and the sake of this column), let’s say they are two sides of the same coin.

As far as literacy is concerned, I’m grateful that publishing has been blown apart in the last 40 years. Although I appreciated reading fiction by John Updike, John Cheever, John Irving, and Saul Bellow, they were urbanites, mostly from the Northeast. Even the seminal female poets, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton hailed from there. They were also all white, all upper-middle class writers. Publishers decided that they spoke for all of us.

Now, we have voices like Sherman Alexie, Toni Morrison, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, and so many others to show us a wider range of human experience. As American culture has shifted, today’s American writers depict a country that is no longer self-satisfied and materially sated. The voices and experiences we can now read range far and wide.

Now, literature gives us the stranger and the outcast struggling to breathe free, and readers are the better for it. Wally Lamb’s newest book, “The River is Waiting” introduces readers to an unemployed father who uses drugs to cope. He ends up in prison after accidentally killing his son.

I have watched some dark, Scandinavian series on Netflix, but listening to one particular chapter in Lamb’s book was almost unbearable. I almost quit, but it was for book club, and in the end, I’m glad I persisted.

I also just finished “Demon Copperhead,” by Barbara Kingsolver, and it takes the main elements of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” and transposes them into modern-day Appalachia. If you know nothing about the opioid crisis in that part of the country, this book will more than fill in the gaps.

This Pulitzer Prize winner is full of heartbreak, but it’s also full of wry observations about human nature, and it’s laugh-out-loud funny, too.

Both books tell gripping stories of an America in decline. In other words, they reflect life for those who are not bright and shiny and flush with cash. Increasingly, this is a growing reality for many Americans.

In fiction, there must be redemption, and in both novels, artistic expression is the means to transcend their personal demons. What an unexpected joy to learn that in each story, educators encourage the main character to pursue their art. In “The River is Waiting” it’s a librarian; in “Demon Copperhead” it’s a teacher.

So, yes, the world that the literary greats of the 1970s explored is gone. What we now have in published storytelling is wider, deeper, and grittier, and it’s the truth we live now, and thank goodness authors can tell these stories. Thank goodness we still have the freedom to read them.

Across much of the country, the weather has been harsh, bringing subzero temperatures to the upper Midwest and snow in the South and East, but the national temperature feels like everything is burning.

There was yet another death on the streets of Minneapolis over the weekend.

So much has been said already, but it has left me mute. All I can do is sit and reflect.

No, you say, this is a time to act! Yes, of course. Yes, but today, I cannot carry that load. Today, I have no energy to march or hold a sign or cry “Justice!” Today, all I can do is sit and grieve. All I can do is allow the weight of the world to settle into my core.

In a few weeks, another grandbaby will be born into my family, and today I am thinking about that baby. This will be another blest child, a loved child, but a child whose parents see the world and want it to be other than what it is.

When my daughter was a baby herself, I remember seeing an attack on TV, in a night sky, half a world away. It was the first time I heard the term “Scud missiles.” It was the first time I worried about the future and the fate of the world.

The conflagration passed in less than five weeks, and I wondered if this was what wars were going to be like now. Volleys and skirmishes. I had come of age during Vietnam; the nightly news broadcasted the day’s body counts and college campuses roiled with rage. It seemed to last forever.

Fast forward a couple of years to the birth of my son. Fast forward yet again, and he was in school. Life moves apace. One bright fall day, as we headed for a field trip, a teacher whispered that a plane hit one of the Twin Towers in New York City. By the time we arrived at the park on the northern edge of the county, a second plane had struck the other tower.

This was before cell phones, and the only way to get news was from the bus radio. I thought about the two of us in these woods and the rest of the family miles away.

I thought about the movie “Testament” and wondered if the world was going to end. It was a strange reaction. That film was about a nuclear attack, so there were no real parallels to what we later came to call 9/11. Except the family in that 1983 movie was separated when the bomb went off, and so, now, were we.

That’s all I wanted that morning, for us to be together.

Perhaps that is what I’m feeling now: wanting to gather the chicks under my wing, as in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, to protect those I love in a time when savagery reigns.

What’s happening now cannot be a surprise, not to anyone who’s been paying attention, but here’s the thing about human nature. Anyone who said after the election, “Look, this guy and his henchfolk are hellbent on destruction. They do not care about you or me.” Anyone who said that got laughed at, disregarded, or regarded as alarmist and dramatic. No one listens to Cassandra.

In the 1965 film, “Ship of Fools,” two outcasts—Glocken, a little person and Lowenthal, a Jew—are table mates on a ship sailing from Mexico to Germany in 1933. Glocken understands that the Jews aboard are sailing to their death. Lowenthal scoffs: “There are a million Jews in Germany. What are they going to do? Kill all of us?”

Human nature doesn’t want to look in the dead eyes of hatred. We don’t want to listen to the Glockens. Americans are Lowenthals to their core.

“Congress will hold him to account.” “The Supreme Court will overrule.” “We have secure and safe voting.” “The safeguards will hold him in check.” “ICE won’t come to _____.”

During 45’s term, Americans simply didn’t want to see. The mishandled morass of COVID wasn’t enough? The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Ashli Babbitt, and numerous others weren’t enough? January 6 was a day of love? Death and destruction is the point, and we cannot bring ourselves to admit it.

When Renee Nicole Good was killed by ICE, people said, “Well, now, NOW Is the inflection point. Now, the Democrats/Republicans/Congress will rise up.”

Yet, here we are. Another death. Alex Pretti. Say his name. Add it to the list. So, today, I sit in silence, hands in my lap.

And all of this reflection started because I looked, really looked, at the photo on the January calendar at work, the trees and grasses donned in a heavy coat of hoarfrost, the river open and flowing, the sky blue, clouds like rain, and I wished for a world where a walk along that river, on that frosty morning, was my only concern for the day.

My mother had a few church cookbooks when I was growing up, and the recipes had been submitted by women who survived the Depression, who perhaps had many mouths to feed, no fancy or exotic ingredients, and no food processors.

Those cookbooks used to be the default church fundraiser half a century ago. I used to work at a print shop whose specialty was producing such publications, and we churned out dozens of cookbooks from little towns in Iowa and surrounding states.

It was the first time I’d heard of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, because a church there contracted with us on a project. At the time, it seemed like such a funny name. I have since learned that the town was named for a Sisseton Sioux Chief by that name.

Our company did have at least one far-flung account involving a Christian school in California. We advertised in some church magazines, and this school picked us over other cookbook producers.

We probably had the best price, being midwestern and all, and while I can’t swear to it, it wouldn’t have surprised me if someone in California had relatives in the Sioux County town where I worked. We called that web of relationship “Dutch Bingo.”

Relatives or not, near or far, the production of each cookbook was much the same. We’d receive pages—stacks really—of typed recipes, and in those long-ago days, we used Compugraphic typesetting machines, which spat out long galleys of text as the paper was fed into a processing bath.

The wet snakes of typeface were then placed on a heated surface call the “dryer.” Then we’d bend the long strips like ribbon candy and send them back with the original pages to be proofread by the cookbook committee.

After the galleys were returned to us and we made corrections, we ran the strips through a “waxer,” a machine that distributed a fine layer of melted wax on the backs of the strips. Then the recipes were cut apart and positioned onto paste-up pages.

For anyone familiar with journalism back in the day, you’ll know that this was also the way newspapers, magazines, and printed material were produced. That manual process ceased long ago with the advent of desktop publishing.

While the galley and paste-up method was labor-intensive, there was a deep satisfaction when the finished newspaper rolled off the press, or the cookbook was finished with a spiral binding.

Inside their covers, most of the cookbooks carried the same kinds of recipes with a definite Midwestern sensibility. There were lots of hamburger casseroles and endless pages of Jell-O® recipes in the salad section, but Jell-O® might also figure into some desserts, too. It was a church supper staple.

Years ago, Wes Jackson, co-founder and president emeritus of The Land Institute, wrote an essay, “Becoming Native to This Place” where he recounts finding a box of programs for a women’s group in Matfield Green, Kansas, a town that had seen better days.

Rather than discount the lives of the uneducated women in a dusty town, he examined their work with an anthropologist’s eye, recognizing the humanity in their quest for self-improvement.

In their own way, church cookbooks and the production of them are artifacts worthy of anthropological study, too. They represent a way of doing things at a certain time, in a certain place. We can laugh at or sniff at the ubiquity of cream of mushroom soup and tater tots and say, “We are so much better off with our arugula and avocado toast” and no doubt that is true.

If the compilers of all these cookbooks were anything like the folks in my hometown of Hospers, they were hard-working people trying to live decent and honest lives, and it’s both mean and lazy to demean their less-than-sophisticated foodways.

It’s also mean and lazy for the US Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, to insult Americans by saying a paltry piece of chicken about as thick as a Sharpie, a corn tortilla, one broccoli floret, and “one other [unnamed] thing” constitutes a meal. Maybe for a toddler, but even then, it’s ridiculous. This is when a laugh or a sniff is an appropriate and deserved response.

I’m old enough to remember when “putting food on the table” involved direct, physical labor. For my parents, it meant planting two big gardens, weeding and watering, harvesting and preserving. And no doubt my mom cracked open that church cookbook when it came time to make watermelon pickles.

Many Americans are trying to find ways to rise up and resist the fascist-driven administration. During WWII, Americans planted Victory Gardens as a way of feeding themselves, instilling self-reliance, and relieving the pressure on the wartime food supply.

Perhaps resistance might include reviving this practice. We could call our little plots Democracy Gardens and create community and church cookbooks (albeit online) to reflect new recipes as we discover how to feed ourselves again.

Thanks, but no thanks, Secretary Rollins. We can do better than your simulated starvation.

I joined a virtual book club during the COVID-19 lockdown, and it was a lifeline. It was also the first time I’d ever joined a book club. Odd thing for a book lover/word nerd/writer/librarian to say, but there it is.

Before that, there were kids to raise and a host of other demands or challenges with time. Plus, when time was at a premium, I wanted to read what I wanted to read, and it usually wasn’t what everyone else was reading.

The virtual book club still meets, but the “book” part of the club has all but ceased to be. Now a more accurate description would be: an occasional check-in for the geographically dispersed. Apparently, this happens to some other book clubs, too.

A few months ago, I finally joined an in-person book club. Some members read a lot—I mean, a LOT, and are up on all the latest and hottest authors and titles. I fall asleep while reading, so I am a slacker. They let me join anyway.

Getting hold of the latest and greatest titles, though, has proved to be challenging. Not everyone wants to buy a new book each month or has an Audible subscription. Also, some people prefer to read rather than listen, so an audio book isn’t an attractive option.

No problem, just use inter-library loan, right? Well, thanks to the dumbness of DOGE, the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ budget was slashed, and the federal cuts affect state libraries.

State libraries provide funding for inter-library loan reimbursements and related services, so now, you’ll wait longer for your requests to arrive if you live in Iowa. If you live in South Dakota, well, their state library’s cuts were so severe that they suspended ILL funding entirely.

In an age, when we are deluged by more information than we can possibly read, digest, or critically examine, it’s ironic that obtaining books through libraries is becoming more challenging.

I’m not even talking about the folks who are trying to remove materials from both school and public libraries. You can read the latest from Nicole Baart on the ongoing challenges at the Sioux Center Public Library.

What I’m talking about is access at its most basic level, how books get into people’s hands or in the case of ebooks and audio books, into their devices.

Let’s start with physical books. When a book is published, the copies are typically sent to a wholesale book distributor where bookstores and libraries order copies of new releases.

The largest book distributor in America, Baker & Taylor, recently announced that they are going out of business. Baker & Taylor has been the leader in book distribution for decades and was especially popular with libraries. On the other hand, this news seems like it would be a huge win for its competitor, Ingram.

While Ingram might be happy about increased business, it also requires infrastructure and staffing changes. Stepping into the bigger shoes vacated by B&T is not going to happen overnight. So, there may be a temporary slowdown in book distribution, and libraries and bookstores and their patrons will be inconvenienced.

At this news, some people will certainly say, “Why do we even have libraries anymore? Everything is on the internet.”

“Nobody buys (or needs) physical books anymore.”

“I get all the books I want on my Kindle/phone/iPad.”

But here’s the thing: Not everything is on the internet and not necessarily freely. When it comes to ebooks, you can buy them from the Kindle store and there’s subscription-based Audible for audiobooks. Lucky the person who can buy an electronic book in either form whenever they want.

Barring that, the State Library of Iowa offers electronic books to all Iowa libraries who participate in their Bridges program. Bridges is the name of the program, and Libby is the name of the app that delivers electronic book formats, either as ebooks or audio books.

So, there’s the library, yes. What a lot of people don’t understand is that electronic versions cost a library more than purchasing a physical book, and the library rarely owns said titles. Electronic versions of books are usually leased by contract for specific lengths of time.

If you read the next great American detective mystery on Libby and tell your best friend about it, they may have to wait awhile for their turn. Licensing limits the number of checkouts allowed per title and sometimes the wait list is months long.

I have been on a waiting list behind more than 400 people for an electronic title, telling me I may have to wait 37 weeks. Of course, I gave up and tried inter-library loan. Most of the time the book will arrive, but not always. I have had requests canceled because too few libraries owned the book or because it was too new to lend to other libraries.

Recently, I requested an ILL for a title that my book club planned to read. I placed the request as soon as we decided on the title, and on the day of our meeting, the book finally arrived. Another member placed an ILL request through another library and still didn’t have the book by the night of the meeting.

And yes, there are libraries that purchase multiple copies of books—book sets—and they will lend these to book clubs, but you have to pick the right book and plan far in advance. A further complication for us, barring the use of book sets, is that our book club members live in different communities and use different libraries. So, not a workable option for us.

Joni Mitchell sang, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.” But I know what I had when I had it. Easy access. Efficient service. It’s not gone, but it’s fading fast.