Food and Wood

I worked as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in 2007.  The weekend before the election between he and John McCain I went to Easton, Iowa in Madison County, where the famous covered bridges are, and went door to door for a weekend passing out campaign material and engaging targeted voters.  As I drove home, I had a feeling he would win.  And when he did, I was relieved.  I purposely turned away from politics for some months after that, taking a break as his administration got settled.  I wanted to see how he shaped the ongoing American debate and created change.   

I didn’t have that feeling this past election, and even after the results of the vote were clear the dread continued.  Only now am I able to breathe, sit back, and let Biden turn policy around to solve the obvious problems that were created over the past four years.  There was a huge pent-up demand for competency that is being filled.  I still watch Lester Holt and Rachel Maddow at night, but I’ve vowed not to constantly interrupt my thoughts with worries about our future. 

There are big thoughts we need to share and talk about, like politics and social change, and then there are small private thoughts that we rarely discuss.  I think that’s unfortunate.  We get a lot of comfort from simple things, and we need to share them too, to connect on another level.  Poets have always known that, and other thoughtful people in music and the arts.  But representing simple thoughts need not be confined to them.

Although American life as seen on the news has been violent and unpredictable, for many of us our everyday lives have become slow and certain during this pandemic.  At least mine has.  I’ve turned inward, and it’s not all bad.  I have time to think.  I look more closely at the mundane, the every day, the basic.  I find myself caught up in things I connect with daily.  Like food and fuel. 

I haven’t had breakfast in a restaurant for nearly a year, not that I often ate out in the morning.  I get up early, before it is light most days, and make my own breakfast.  I alternate between two meals, steel cut oats and eggs.  Simple foods I know.  I mix it up a little.   

Steel cut oats, however, don’t lend themselves to great variety.  Although I grew up eating Old Fashioned Quaker Oats cooked by my Mom, I now buy Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats.   Steel cut oats are also known as pinhead oats or Irish oats.  Bob’s steel cut oats contain a single ingredient, whole grain organic oats. 

Prominent on Bob Moore’s plastic bag packaging is “The Golden Spurtle” which is the trophy given the top prize winner at the World Porridge Making Championship held annually in Carrbridge, Scotland.  Bob won the award in 2016.  Heady stuff for steel cut oat aficionados, winning that golden spurtle, which is an ancient style oatmeal stirring stick, best used in the right hand in a clockwise motion. Pick any topic.  With Google, you can dive into it as deeply as you want. 

I got hooked on steel cut oats after my son Dean gave me a can of John McCann’s Irish oats from some fancy Chicago grocery.  McCann’s oats won the award for “Uniformity of Granulation” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.  Objective affirmation in the form of international awards seems to be a thing with steel cut oats.  I kept McCann’s can and store Bob’s oats in it.

Steel cut oats cook for a long time.  Get them to a boil, turn down the heat, and cook them slowly for 20 minutes.  It’s a one to four ratio, a quarter cup of oats to a cup of liquid.  I boil them in half water half milk.  Pinch of kosher salt.

Just the oats would be good, but the opportunity to stew something else with them for twenty minutes opens up a world of possibilities.  OK, not a world, but several. 

Dried fruit plumps up great with the oats: raisins, prunes, dried apricots, pineapple, or cranberries.  Or fresh fruit thrown in with ten minutes to go, blueberries, apples, blackberries, peaches, raspberries, whatever you like, or whatever you have.

While it cooks, I make coffee. After the oats fully cook down, I put them in a bowl, squeeze a small circle of South Ottawa Township honey on top, and cool them off with a splash of cold milk from my glass.  I eat them while I do the Chicago Trib crossword.  Mornings are good.

On the flip side (pun intended) eggs are much more versatile.  I get eggs these days from the Nettle Creek farm where I go weekly to buy raw milk.  I see the chickens up close walking around the barnyard.  I cook their eggs every way; over easy, sunny side up, over hard, or poached.  I hard boil them and make egg salad from time to time and spread it on toast for a quick bite.  I’m about to try a recipe in the sous vide for foolproof soft-boiled eggs you can keep in the fridge and use whenever you choose. But my favorite way to cook eggs is in an omelet.

I’ve gotten deep into spontaneous omelets.  This recipe involves standing in front of an open refrigerator door and choosing ingredients from what you see before you.  Leftovers play heavily into spontaneous omelets.  Uneaten vegetables from a previous stir fry are ready-made and terrific, or a handful of raw spinach braised in a hot skillet covered by the mix of beaten eggs and a dribble of milk.  Feta cheese, or any cheese, even cottage, goes especially good with spinach or any omelet.  I grate cheese and keep it handy in the fridge just for that purpose. 

My omelet vegetables of choice are yellow onions and peppers both sweet and hot.  I always chop at least one serrano pepper into every spontaneous omelet I make for myself, sometimes two.  Two will wake you up if you find yourself feeling groggy. Poblanos complement serranos nicely.  Bell peppers are fine.  No need to be picky. 

I usually skip or go light on meat in my omelets.  The other day I added four sardines to a spontaneous omelet.  They were leftover from a previous day’s sardine, onion, and mustard on whole wheat sandwich.  I don’t recommend sardines.  Turns out there is good reason sardine omelets are not on the menu of your favorite diner.  Liver sausage doesn’t work well either.  Spontaneity and the risk of failure sometimes go hand in hand.  Diced ham is good, as is Spam.  Chicken is just OK.  I skip beef altogether.

When I add meat, it is usually leftover bacon from BLT’s or Italian sausage from a previous night’s celebration of pasta and red wine chopped small and sprinkled in amongst the cheese and veggies.  I’ve learned to add meat to omelets sparingly or serve it on the side with beans, rice, toast, or tortillas. Omelets are an homage to eggs, and meat tends to hog all the attention.  I top off every spontaneous omelet with a strip of red Sriracha sauce. 

So that’s breakfast.  Cooked in a solitary way, before the sun comes up, with nothing but NPR and the Tribune as companions.  I love that time.  Just me, the stove, and the food.  Oats one day, eggs the next.  Done right, you think about little else for a good half hour.

In winter, another common sustainable commodity joins my daily pandemic routine.  Wood.  I eat breakfast and go to the shack.  When I get there it's cold.  Food fuels the body, but wood makes winter in the shack bearable. 

I have a small wood burning stove next to me in the shack.  The first order of business when stepping into the shack is to get the stove hot and the shack warm.

Although tiny, you would be amazed at how much wood you can burn in that small steel cube in one heating season.  Especially a season in which you never leave town.

Over the summer, with the help of generous friends, I assembled nearly all this winter’s firewood.  Last spring, I put out a single mention of exhausting my fuel supply and immediately got help.  A woman in Grundy County was cleaning out barns and sheds and gave me leftover wood posts from long removed fences.  A friend in the neighborhood gave me pine scraps from a wood deck he replaced with a patio.

Another friend in Serena Township lives on six acres of timber and heats his whole house with wood.  He fells dead trees, cuts their trunks into stove length logs, splits them into manageable pieces, then dries them to produce maximum heat.  He gave me limb wood he usually ignores or uses only for bonfires.  About the size of my wrist, some as big as my calf, they work perfectly for my little stove.  I store them in lengths that fit under the roof of my woodshed and cut the wood into 5” lengths as I need using a battery-powered chain saw in a jig.

To complement the wood, I have for several years been given Henry County pinecones and Rutland Township corn cobs.  The pinecones when placed on top of half a brown paper bag, and topped off with kindling, are perfect for starting fires.

The Rutland Township corn cobs are best for finishing fires at the end of the day.  They burn hot but quickly.  When I’m about to go back to the house, but the shack is cooling off, I get a burst of heat to finish off the day by filling the stove with cobs.  They start with a whoosh, burn like crazy, and are soon ash.

A word about the wood.  My friend in Serena Township with timber has burned wood from his property for 30 plus years and yet his property looks just as wooded as it was when he first showed it to me.  The limbs he gives me are mostly oak without bark, but mixed in there is cherry, hard maple, and hickory.  He measures the moisture content of his wood and burns it only when it is less than 20% and more than 10%.  Wood that is too wet does bad things to your stovepipe.  Too dry and it's not worth the effort.  Very few BTU’s.  I bought a moisture meter.  Everything anyone has given me is good to go.

Two kinds of wood stand out.  The posts from Grundy County were mostly round yellow pine but mixed in were some weathered gray posts with slots in them, the kind you slide rails into giving that nice old look of a split rail fence.  I had no idea what they were.  I ran low on kindling and figured to split those pine posts into small pieces.  On a whim, I cut into the non-descript posts with the slots.

I knew as soon as I smelled the sawdust come off the chain saw they were cedar. The shack is sided with tongue and groove cedar.  The woodshed is roofed with cedar shake shingles given to me by McConnaughhay & Sons Roofing.  Cedar resists rot and insects and lasts damn near forever.  It’s lightweight, fine-grained, splits like a dream, weathers beautifully, and requires little or no care.  It seems almost sacrilegious to burn it.  But when you do, when you cut it in small pieces and split it into thin slabs, it ignites at low temperature and is perfect for starting fires.  I feel blessed having it.

Mixed among all of it were some hedge posts.  I knew they were hedge because I grew up around those posts.  They were the oldest fence posts on our farm.  As I got older, we began making fence with steel posts, especially electric fence, but the old posts, which Dad always used for corners, were hedge.

 We used them to hold up woven wire around the sheep lot and barbed wire around the cow pastures.  When buried in the dirt the bottoms rarely rotted out.  Some of them came from trimmed hedgerows that formed that farm’s first fences.  The hedges not removed grew into trees long ago and produced light green hedge apples as big as softballs.

I’d never cut into one of those posts.  I knew them as whole things, heavy gnarly gray posts that resisted mightily the staples and nails we pounded into them.  As more hedge posts were removed and replaced by steel, we stacked the old posts around a tree in the sheep lot and burned them for fall wiener roasts.  They burned hot.

I was given four hedge posts.  They were hard for my small Stihl chain saw to cut through.  The snow around the sawbuck was covered in yellow sawdust.  The proper name for hedge is Osage Orange.  It’s a dense heavy wood that is 30% heavier than oak, and as difficult to split as it is to cut.  But when I reduced it to chunks that fit into my stove and added them to the coals of a hot fire, I realized how good they were as firewood.

They burn extremely hot and last longer than any wood I’ve ever burned.  I counted 28 rings on the cedar post I burned.  That’s 28 years as a living tree and God knows how many more as a fence post.  I’ve decided to save the hedge for the coldest days of winter.  I love having three posts left. 

I bought my stove from a small company called Navigator Stove Works.  Before I did, I talked to Andrew Moore, the guy who designed them on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington.  I gave him the dimensions of the shack and asked if he thought his smallest model would heat it sufficiently in a Northern Illinois winter.  He did a little research, called me back, and told me he thought it would if I used 2x6 wall studs and insulated it well. 

Andrew intended his stoves to be used mostly for the small cabins of sailboats but found they are often used by owners of tiny shelters like the shack.

“Don’t be afraid to run that stove hard.  I designed it for everyday use.  Burn as much wood as you want, but back off if the steel glows red.  That’s too much.”

“Can I burn coal in it?”

“No.  Coal or pellets put out too much heat, and you could damage the steel.  You need a different stove for that.  But I think you can burn any type of wood there is.”

While I burned the hedge, I watched my stove closely to see if any part of it glowed.  It didn’t.  But I’m sure it was the hottest that stove had ever been.

Everything I’ve written about today; from oats to hedge, pinecones to corn cobs, milk to honey, and peppers to eggs, is sustainable.  The trees, plants, and animals all keep replacing themselves.  They are gifts from the earth.  I feel part of that on winter mornings, part of a cycle that will continue long after I’m gone. 

It’s good to get your head out of your…politics, stop scrolling and stay away from the news feed. Try it.  There’s a world of wonder in it.  It could bring the relief you need.  There will be a time to voice your opinion and do what you can to shape the debate, if our country finds ways to have civil discourse again, but it doesn’t have to be your full-time job. 

Make yourself a bowl of steel cut oats, throw together an omelet, burn some wood.  It works for me. 

Learning Alone

 

A while back I posted a story to my blog about Polio that was especially well received.  I judge that by the number of clicks, or times a post is opened.  I am very grateful my pieces are being read at all.  Some are read more than others, which is fine with me.  I try to write what I feel rather than anticipating what you want to read.  Some of the stories resonate and some don’t.

Something unintended and good happened with that Polio story.  It was picked up in a way.  I have a friend who is a high school English teacher.  I worked with her mother and father at a social service agency and have known her since she was a little girl.  She was our daughter’s first babysitter, and our daughter is now having her first baby.  Though there is a big age difference between us, she reads my blog.  A valued reader as are all of you.

My friend is both a teacher and a mother of three. She sees this pandemic we are struggling to get through in a unique way.  She understands the challenge of teaching remotely, observes and develops an understanding of what it is like to be a student learning virtually, and is at the same time a parent of three high school students.  That gives her a perspective I will never know.  I feel fortunate the Polio story resonated with her. 

She assigned Polio 1952 as reading for a Senior English class, typically World Lit, but as my friend the teacher describes, the kids needed changes this year to keep them going.  The assignment began with this prompt: “Respond to the story and how you think we will look back at these pandemic times 30-40 years from now." She shared the student’s responses with me.  After I shared my observations of a pandemic 62 years ago, they shared their real-life experiences over the past year.  Quite an exchange. 

The students drew parallels between Polio and Coronavirus, empathized with my characters, told me how the story made them feel and related their own experiences during this pandemic.  That kind of feedback is pure gold for a writer.  I only taught English full time for a year, and believe me, I was never as good a teacher as my friend.  I would have loved to have imagined and assigned such a creative project as a rookie in 1973-74.  But, I stuck to the book.  It was a tough year.

Let’s get to the point.  Here is what my friend and her students had to say about my story, living through the pandemic, remote learning and teaching, and life in 2020.

The story was both interesting and sad.  Seeing someone else’s story about an epidemic is comforting in a way, knowing there are people out there who have gone through things similar to what we are going through right now.  While this pandemic sucks, I feel as if it isn’t as bad as the Polio epidemic because Polio caused problems pretty much the rest of your life.

It is tough reading about polio as we are also going through something that we are scared about getting.  Reading about how fast Polio spread is so close to how Covid is spreading.  I think when we get older and look back at how this pandemic affected us all we will just be glad for the people we didn’t lose during it.  I will probably just be happy it is over, but I will definitely be thankful for the lessons it taught me.  Lessons like how I am more appreciative for everything I have and all the family support and love.  I will never be able to forget my senior year that’s for sure.

This story was tragic, but it feels accurate for the times we’re living in now.  Just like Covid, with Polio, they must distance themselves from others as much as possible.  I think we’re going to look back on this and be proud of what we got through.  This year has been crazy, but if we all stick together, we’ll make it through.  It’s not just the pandemic we’ve been through.  We made it through the riots, the BLM protests, all the madness of the world.  And we will continue to fight together and make it through it all.

I could only imagine how bad polio was for your body.  It affected the spinal cord and caused paralysis.  I had to go through my Mom having Coronavirus, then I had it and it is not fun.  So, I can only imagine what people with polio had to go through.  Living through a pandemic is scary because you don’t know if you will get the virus or not.  But the story Dave McClure wrote is a great way to get people to understand what happened back in the day, way before we had the technology to correct something so quickly.

The story was very interesting to me.  It is weird to think about different illnesses that now we rarely consider.  The fact that I have only seen people in iron lungs from documentaries and old pictures says a lot.  For older people, iron lungs were normal, and they knew people who ended up in one.  There was so much personal touch added to this story that made it interesting.  I felt like I was there with them.  The lockdown they had made me feel less alone in this pandemic.

In the future, I think people will look back at Covid and think of it as something like polio.  The virus has affected me personally, so I know I will never forget it.  My ex got Covid while watching my daughter, who ended up quarantined for two weeks, then my ex’s mom got it, and she was quarantined for another two weeks.  That is a whole month without me seeing my daughter.  I was so scared she wouldn’t remember me, or worst-case scenario she would get sick and I would not be able to see her.  I hope people look back on this as a learning experience.  They can see how to stay safe and make yourself less prone to having or spreading illness.

The story sounds very similar to what is happening with today’s pandemic. Families are experiencing the loss of family members, struggling with financial burdens.  People cannot say goodbye to their loved ones during the virus, just like in the story where the siblings could not say goodbye to their sister.   A vaccine wasn’t found until three years after the time when the Polio story took place.  I think with all our technological advances a cure will be found faster because of computers being able to analyze long protein chains and RNA, unlike in 1952.

The story was good and realistic.  Pandemics are very sad, and there is no way around it.  I liked how the father, Dean, kept a positive mindset and kept calm.  That’s what you need to do when chaos is happening.  You need to be there for people.

Although I think we will get a vaccine for Covid 19, more pandemics are bound to happen.  This pandemic now has been very tough, and almost seems avoidable.  Just last Saturday, I lost my grandpa to Corona.  So, me personally, I’m going to look back at these times angrily.  I know I can’t be angry at a pandemic for taking my grandpa, but ultimately that’s how I’m going to feel.  But I do believe there will be another outbreak within the next 40 years.  History repeats itself.

Thinking about the pandemic thirty or forty years from now, I will be around my Mom’s age.  I have to say that I will be very concerned about how people dealt with it.  I know from my Mom’s point of view, she is very worried about losing her job and she is worried about paying her bills and putting food on the table for us.  She has a good job, but she must have a second job because of all the bills.  She lost her second job because of this pandemic.

If we were looking back on this pandemic in 30-40 years, we will probably be living in a world where everything is made easy.  You can see already that people today like to be lazy.  They do online shopping, have groceries delivered, eat take out…etc..  It makes sense now since we shouldn’t go out and spread the virus, but we have already adapted to this “lazy” way.  I know I have.  Everything will be different because of this virus.

I have seen jokes on Tik Tok of kids saying that in 35 years the history of the pandemic will be in our kids’ textbooks.  It is made out as a joke on Tik Tok, but it will probably really happen.  In 35 years, it will only be a memory and no longer reality.  We will adjust to our future life and the coronavirus won’t be the talk of the town like it is today.  I imagine though that many will have some kind of PTSD from these times. 

I don’t often have regrets, but there are times I regret not staying in teaching, keeping myself close to young people who bring honest and fresh thoughts like this to everyday life.

Last but not least, please read closely the observations of the pandemic from someone who has done just that for eighteen years, my friend the English teacher.

By and large, their day is like this.  They wake up just before school starts and log on while still sitting in their beds.  They don’t show their faces on screen and barely talk other than a few chats in Teams meetings.  On-screen is an enthusiastic cheerleading teacher.  Their students wonder why they should still care about putting forth the effort when the situation doesn’t change.  For them, it's log on, do the work, go back to bed.  All seems lost.  What is lost you ask?

There are no friends in the hall to shove around and laugh with, no Friday nights, no fancy dresses or dances to go to, no chicken nuggets flying in the cafeteria, no memories to take pics of and send in Snapchat streaks.

To adults, it may seem selfish but each of us, whether we hated school or loved it, had the experience.  These kids are alone.  They are crawling through a year with no reward other than a letter grade.

I know I paint a sad picture, but it’s their reality.  While their chances of contracting the virus are slim and their recovery almost guaranteed, the virus has killed their spirit, nonetheless.  I just hope we can salvage some of the year together so they can be kids again. 

There are kids who come from homes where the Wi-Fi is strong, food is plentiful, and support is all around them.  But I’m afraid many lose sight of kids and families who never know those comforts.  For them, I feel the most.

The history books will have a unit on this pandemic and that is what will be taught to my grandchildren and theirs.  Not recorded will be the long-term effects of educational gaps, mental health issues, and screen addiction that will be immeasurable.  I’m trying to help both my own kids and my students learn coping skills they can use to face adversity, practice resilience, and seek ways to help each other along the way.  I never thought we’d be living through something like this.  I’m sure your siblings in 1952 didn’t think so either.  I look forward to your piece which reflects on their words.

I think the words written by these students and their teacher speak for themselves.  But let me add this to what they expressed so well on their own.

When I was a teacher, 22 years old and very naïve, one of my favorite duties was homeroom.  I taught five classes of freshman English, but I had a senior homeroom.  Those kids helped me much more than I helped them.

I went to a school so small we didn’t have homerooms.  The concept was foreign to me.  The daily routine when I taught was to gather with your homeroom students before school really started, take attendance, read the announcements, and hang out before your first class.  I used that time to ask my homeroom kids, who had been at the school three years longer than I had, how things worked.  I was baffled by the schedules, unacquainted with the rules, ignorant of traditions.  They helped me greatly.

They were equally supportive of each other.  Homerooms back then were alphabetically assigned (I think) and thus random.  All kinds of kids, college-bound and not, athletes, musicians, stoners, juicers, the popular and unpopular, the outgoing and introverted, found themselves together.  They learned about one another but also formed their own identity.  Homeroom was its own thing, and they were their own group.

When someone was absent, someone else usually knew why.  They talked to each other, some like crazy others hardly at all.  They laughed and smiled, got upset, reacted with glee and anger.  They lived together for ten minutes a day consistently for four years.  They became their own small community.  It was a small part of the high school experience, but it was important.  And real.  And up close.  I still see some of those kids around town. 

I don’t think that can be recreated that on Zoom.  We can see videos of each other on-screen, we can listen to the voices of others through speakers or headphones, but in the end, we are alone.  Like staring at your smartphone and reading words in a text, it is communicating with people but not being with them.  Better than nothing of course, but never as satisfying as life lived in the presence of one another.  I’m afraid it will always leave us feeling separated and alone.   

Just as homes are the logical solution for homelessness, a safe return to school is the obvious answer to the problems my friend the teacher, and her students, have experienced during this pandemic.  But simply returning to the classroom may not be enough.

We can reach out to students most affected during the pandemic and engage them in summer school.  We can use existing programs or create new ones if needed, to make up for lost credits.  We should all work to make up for the deficits our community’s young people have racked up during the pandemic.   

Post Script: In our community, high school students returned to in-school instruction Tuesday morning the 19^th.  My friend the teacher read an email from me containing a draft of this post.  I wanted to make sure she approved of how I described her and her student’s experiences.  She did.  This was included in her reply.

As I type this, I have kids back in my classroom! I appreciate, as do they and anyone who knows students who have been removed from school because of the pandemic, your sincere acknowledgment of their experiences. They are SO HAPPY TO BE HERE!

There was real, raw, and wild energy in my house last night as my kids picked out outfits packed their backpacks and signed the daily required slip certifying they are not feeling symptoms and have not been in contact with infected people who have or might have Covid.  Now our hope is to finish the year together.

It’s been a bad year.  Education has taken a big hit, not only since the virus but over the past four years.  If we work together, making public education a priority, we can make it better.  Better perhaps than ever.  Of all the challenges before us as Americans, improving education may be the most important.

 

Tumultuous Days in America

I’m on a run of missing important historical moments.  On the second Monday of September 2001 the Bob Dylan CD I had pre-ordered, Love and Theft, came in the mail.  I waited till the next morning after Dean and I had breakfast and he was out the door in time for school before I put it in the stereo.  I cranked it up and played it twice. The third time I started singing along.  Then I took it to my car and played it as I drove down the hill to the office. 

As I walked to the office down the alley from where I parked, I could smell the cooks getting lunch ready at the little Mexican restaurant near the office.  I love the smell of tortillas heating up.  Reminds me of Oaxaca.  I was whistling a just learned song from the new album (“Floater”) as I walked in YSB’s back door. 

I knew something was going on as soon as I walked in the door.  My staff were huddled around one of the office doors down the hall from mine, stacked up, leaning in, listening intently to the sound of a radio.  It was the news.

“What’s going on?”

My tech person looked at me with big eyes.

“You mean you haven’t heard?”

“No. What?”

“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.  It’s on fire.”

The day, the year, the world it seemed, fell apart after that.  Our country was attacked by outside forces.  Our reaction to that attack changed the world.

 

On the first Wednesday of 2021, a year that could not arrive soon enough, I was settled into the shack.  I had a fire going since morning and it was cozy.  The world outside the glass wall facing east was wondrous.  Soon after New Year’s Day, we settled into a weather pattern of low gray clouds, moisture, precipitation, but no wind.  For days fine snow, ice, hoar frost, and frozen fog piled up in turn on the branches of trees surrounding the shack, creating patterns of soft white lines.  Winter wrapped around us, soaked up the sound, and made us feel safe. 

Since the winter solstice, I’d been binging on Beethoven.  I heard somewhere that Ludwig Von would have been 250 years old on December 16.  And still popular.  It’s amazing.  I played the symphonies I have; 3,4,5, and 6, some string quartets, and threw in a little Wagner for good measure.

On that morning of January 6, while making coffee, I called my brother Darwin.  We like to talk about politics, and the previous night was a good one for Democrats.  The outcome of a special election in Georgia saw two Democrats headed to Washington, which will give the new Biden administration control of not only the White House and House of Representatives, but the newly formed Senate too.  A new day is going to dawn.

The outgoing Senate was that day scheduled to confirm the vote of the Electoral College and provide a “final answer” to the absurd question of who won the presidential election.  American elections are free, fair, and predictable, unlike the game show Jeopardy, which forces you to guess and place bets.  Elections are based on simple arithmetic, and the presidential race had been added up and tallied for nearly two months.  Approval of the electoral college vote is a formality, and the outcome was clear.  Biden and Harris won.  After saying goodbye to my brother, I headed to the shack and another day in the white woods.  Good days lay ahead. 

After reading the last entry in an advent devotional I began to write while listening to the Ride of the Valkyries.  When it ended, I decided it was time to change the audio.  We were six days into a new year.  I put away the classical and went for jazz.  It had been a long time since I’d heard Chet Baker and Art Pepper.  I put on an album they recorded in 1956 called Playboys.  I forgot how good it was.  As the afternoon began the sky seemed to lighten.  It was Epiphany after all.

When I play music, I keep the CD jacket or album cover on my desk and follow the tracks.  I always smile at the names of the jazz numbers.  Only the musicians know the significance of the titles.  At times, they improvise on a melody I recognize but mostly the tunes and their titles are random and mysterious.

Chet Baker’s trumpet and Art Pepper’s alto sax stand out on numbers like Resonant Emotions, Little Girl, Sonny Boy, and C.T.A..  They are the headliners but their band members, Carl Perkins on piano, Curtis Counce on standup bass, and Lawrence Marable on drums are just as talented.  The shack was energized.  Good jazz can make your heart sing.  My heart sang all afternoon on January 6.

While at my desk in the shack my view is east looking into a wooded ravine.  That day I had seen scattered patches of sunlight break through the trees.  When I leave to go back to my house, I face west toward Caton Road.  On January 6 when leaving the shack at about 4:15 that west-facing view provided my first look at an open sky in days.  I could see blue between clouds glowing orange from the setting sun.  It was beautiful.

In the house, I stopped in the kitchen.  While getting a beer from the fridge, I thought I heard my wife sniffling in the living room.  I could hear the TV.  I went to check on her.

“What’s wrong?”

She pointed to the TV.

“They overwhelmed security and took over the Capitol.  It's awful.  The senators were evacuated to a safe place.  A woman was shot and killed.”

I knelt beside her chair and put my hand on her shoulder.  Both of us stared at the images of rioters breaking windows and jumping into the building which represents the physical heart of America’s representative government.

“Who are they?”

“It’s the people who went to Washington for the Trump rally.  He told them to go to the Capitol.  Sent them there. Told them he was going with them.“

Once again, the day, the year, the world it seemed, fell apart.  Our country was attacked, but this time from the inside.  This attack, now some 20 years later, came from inside the country.  The threat is us. Our reaction to this new attack will change the future of America’s democracy.  If we follow the light, we’ll find our way.