Bear down against the pitch count
There went our buddy Dan Smith at 73, God bless. Brother John wrote about his classmate Friday. I asked John how he was feeling. He coughed. We proofread the obituaries warily. Friends keep showing up there. At 66, you have to have a strategy before getting out of the car. Thoughts of the inevitable are hard to avoid.
John asked if I asked for the senior citizen discount. Well, no, I never think about that. He suggested that we brothers should get together since, you know, Brother Tom is 80 and not getting any younger. Yeah I suppose we should but we got a paper to get out and can’t we just do that some other time? Maybe when I get old?
As long as there is a paper to get out death can wait. Son Tom could write the editorials but there is so much I have to say and such a short time to say it. I have written more than 2,000 personal columns over 40 years, and maybe twice as many editorials, and still don’t have it quite right because, obviously, the editorial “we” have not gotten our point across. We could have had the world’s problems solved, or at least made Iowa a little less backwards. We have wasted a lot of ink and have to make up for time lost.
Too bad sloth is my way and slouch is my position. You must muster yourself erect and suggest that we are wasting our prospects in the sweetest little spot on Earth.
Mark Twain, who died in 1910 at age 74, said something like living life fully overcomes the fear of your own demise. He also said that Adam did us a favor by bringing on mortality. And he said this: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
I may have used that quote before, but what the hell, it says it all.
The absence of bills, threats, noxious people and deadlines seems like heaven. I do believe in God and guardian angels and saints cheering from some sort of dugout bench along the third base line in the clouds, communing and drinking Scotch whiskey without hangover. I would like to believe that my impure thoughts are just that, and I never murdered anyone or lied to the IRS. I can present my clippings to St. Peter, who might deem one of 100 worthy to keep for recommendation and throw the rest into the inferno. That would be a good showing.
You just never know. The doctor is plumbing that vague pain in my derriere. It could get me. Or that livestock truck could. I know I should give up my addictions but rationalize it by saying I want to have my wits about me when the hooded man with the scythe taps my shoulder. I want to have a good line ready, like:
“Man, can you not see how Iowa’s regressive tax system holds people down? This demands comment! Stand back!”
He may tell you to go for broke and give em hell, old man. Your fastball still might have some hop. Use your pitch count wisely.
Like this, what I told the folks at Lake View who gathered Saturday to hear my ramblings:
“State Sen. Steve Kettering, R-Lake View, made real progress with a Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack. We created a lake restoration fund of about $9 million annually that benefits Lake View today. It’s a drop in the bucket for the challenges our lakes face, but it is real and meaningful. It shows what we can do when we clear the partisanship from our sight and see what our communities actually need: clean lakes, diverse ownership and structure of agriculture, healthy aquifers and busy Main Streets with independent proprietors.
“Okay, so I dream. But we had that once. We had clean water before 1980. We had independent pork producers who traded in an open market. They traded pickups every other year, and there were twice as many farmers. I am not just wallowing in nostalgia. If we could have healthy communities 50 years ago, is the force of consolidation immutable?”
No. It is not. Not in a healthy democracy. When it boils down to it, that’s all you’ve got: the freedom to confront fear, to present a good list of clippings, and to hand off a voice for democracy strong enough to be heard in your little corner of the world. You hope that on the final strike you can walk into that cornfield knowing you gave it what you could, but the damned umpire was blind.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Once again, thank you.
Condolences to you and John. And, as always, thank you for sharing your talent and wisdom.