Roger Wright – Chicago

Danny says, “So I guess the way things are today is kill or be killed.”

His tone like someone saying, “And yes, I’ll have coffee with that.”

He’s not throwing a rock on a Libyan street, planting a mine in the Afghan dust, starving slowly on a grey Chicago Boulevard, or even being told to sit down and shut up in Madison Wisconsin. He sells cars. There are two dealers in town. And the only way he can get customers is to take them from the other guy. What he really needs to do is close the other guy down. He needs to do this to survive.

He’s not complaining. Asking no one for pity. A funny, good guy in his fifties. Long solid marriage. Health. Blessed to have kids. He’s worked for every dollar. If you asked him about his politics, which I never have, he’d probably tell you he was conservative, but the question wouldn’t really interest him. Because so many larger questions loom like a cloud of orange acidic dust raining down upon a wasteland of broken American dreams.

Why are all but such a thin sliver of a few, struggling to survive?

It just wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Lori writes back, “I’m O.K. But I’m like most of us, living on fumes.” Lori is a published author. One who has walked alongside more than one giant of our times. But these days Lori is living on fumes.

It just wasn’t supposed to be this way.

In a billion tiny moments, the struggle now not to thrive but to survive plays out. Chicago is hit by a massive blizzard. My three neighbors start shoveling out the alley that runs behind our houses. I’m not there. But when I get there I see that they have shoveled all the snow into my yard. Blocking my, access to the alley. Confronting them all with “Why would you do that?” The first answer I get back is; “Well, we had to have somewhere to put the snow. Shoveling out the alley was really hard!”

So I ratchet up the discussion. One guy gets it. He says, “I wasn’t thinking, I’m sorry.” Which gives me hope cause now the issue with him is closed. Sometimes I don’t think either.

The second neighbor says, “I was thinking about my kids. And was mad at my husband because he wasn’t helping.”

And the third neighbor doesn’t even see the problem.

Livin on fumes.

Tim writes and says, “There are certain words I’m just going to have to take out of my vocabulary.’ Words like ‘retirement.’ As if the need to even use the word is gone.

Sarah stands up in church and asks for a prayer because she’s a teacher, under attack. In one of the richest school districts in the country. The district has no money problems. But their boss is up for a bigger job. So he has to show he’s raising high today’s most popular smokescreen, ‘the deficit.’ Got to make those budget cuts. Her boss has got to show that he can cut budgets with the best of them. Even if there’s no real need.

Sarah’s world gone sideways. Because the one thing Sarah really doesn’t know how to do is defend why she’s a teacher. “The thing I really can’t understand,” she says like she just lost something but she’s not sure what it is, “Is why they’re attacking our level of education? They’re telling us we’re not very smart. I’ve got a masters degree and I’m almost done with a second one.” And the real question, ‘Why she even needs to defend herself?’ goes missing.

A million tiny pinpricks of kill or be killed.

So you look for a road. Some way out of this descending cloud of just surviving.

Something that can take you to the lost substance of why you’re here. A way to leave this place better than you found it. Something to lift you above “kill or be kiiled.”

You look for a road. Maybe that road is a wild clear stream under an endless blue sky where the salmon run wild. Maybe it’s a room where something you did our said changed something. Helped someone. Maybe you made something. Cleaned something. Took care of something. Maybe your road is the freeing power that comes with the revelation that none of this is really yours, the relief of knowing that you’re really not the center of it all. Maybe your road comes with forgiveness.

As many different kinds of roads as there are people.

Your road more important now than ever. When it’s all about kill or be killed.

You find a road.

Maybe a road that goes right by your home.
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Birget lost her six-year-old son in the winter of 1855 when the root cellar out back of their cabin collapsed and he was crushed under the snowy wind weight of a blizzard in Ephraim Wisconsin that they still talk about today.

She had sent him for a clay tub of sweet cherry preserves. It was just the two of them. She and her book-reading son. Why there was just the two of them, a story on it’s own.

A story that didn’t matter to her community. Because in her community, she was accepted.

The community was a tiny group of Moravians, a Christian group, living by the words:

In essentials unity

In non-essentials liberty

In all things love.

Their search was simply for a place to bring those words to life.

In the grey sky snows of February 1853, their leader, Rev. Andreas Iverson and 3 companions walked east from the tiny outpost of Green Bay Wisconsin. Treading across the ice of Sturgeon Bay and up through bare tree Indian trails, they found their place on a hill over a breathtakingly pristine bay. They called the place Ephraim.

In the spring, Birget, protecting her tiny son, and the community that protected Birget followed.

And as the community took root, Birget lived as a protector of the community. Whether it be the winds, the hunger or the mysteries of the sickness that swept across the community, she would be the one with the root berry teas, the breads, the brute strength to lift the logs in place and then seal off the cabins from the winds. With raw physical strength when she built, with just knowing what to blend when she cooked, and with knowing how to make the cooking fires simmer and roar, with a laughter that spoke to the warm winds of spring and endless tunes she would hum that somehow protected even stronger than the walls, Birget was a protector of the community.

But on that February day, it was noon, the sky was bright as it snowed, that February day when the root cellar collapsed and took the breath of life from her son, there was nothing she could do to protect.

There was only the wail of her sorrow. Echoing through the trees. Some in the community say that it seemed her cries never stopped. Even after she died in the very next frost you could still hear her cries. Years later people in the community say that they could still hear her cries. Cries that prompted prayers of comfort to continually be sang to the heavens.

In essentials unity

In non-essentials liberty

In all things love.

There is a winding hill that leads down into Ephraim and the Bay. Today it’s Highway 42. Back then it was a trail. But the stars that light the way are the same. Even after 153 years. And it’s right there on that hill, where if you listen very, very hard, there are still times you can still hear her cries.

Sometimes in the dancing starry night you can even see her. Chugging along. Off to protect. Off to soothe. Off to be strong. To lift the heaviest of logs if they will keep out the winds that chill her community.

And if the fever pitch of the world’s woes hit their boiling point, she will even leave that hill and shimmer into the souls of those who also try with all their might to protect.

Like that time in Madison.

Birget never belonged to a union. She never was a republican or a democrat, she never manufactured stories of deficits to divert the attention of anyone from anything. She simply would not know how.

But she does know evil.

In the beaten, desolate, too many beers every night auto worker from Janesville who has struggled on for three years now and just the other night was thinking of his favorite movie. “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The part where the evil banker Mr. Potter was offering ten cents on the dollar. And how maybe what the governor was saying in dismantling the union wasn’t all that bad.

Nothing else has worked.

And Birget saw the evil in the rivers of money flowing into the collective rivers of Wisconsin to grow the idea that the thing most harmful to the almost poor are those wretched souls who are very poor. Then lighting the fires of that fight.

Perhaps the very worst evil of all. Evil masked as reasonableness. In the calm, well fed, never missed a meal tones of columnist David Brooks, poisoning the minds of the reasonable by saying, “Private unions are OK because they fight shareholders. But public unions fight taxpayers.” So maybe we ought to take a nice gentle look at public unions. Before we crush them, bury them, suffocate them just the exact same way Birget’s six-year-old son was crushed when that root cellar collapsed 153 years ago. Birget sees as clear as the sun on Ephraim Bay that the goal here is to crush the community. The community that builds. That feeds. That flourishes. That serves.

Birget absorbs these words of pure evil and she starts to wail. She then starts to sing.

It’s a faint cry. Most in the Madison capital don’t hear it. It’s a tiny sound in the background. But then it starts to get louder. And suddenly there is more energy for the fight. That fight that is for nothing less than community. That fight that says: In essentials unity.

And suddenly it’s not just in Madison. It’s a spark. A tiny spark. To the desolate. The discouraged. And it starts playing like a song in every American community.

These forces of evil will not give up.

But Birget the protector won’t either.

So she starts singing loud now. A song that came after her time on earth. But a song she knows well.

Birget sing loud enough for anyone who cares to listen.

And she doesn’t tell. She doesn’t advise. She doesn’t quote a made up fake number. She asks a question. One from the song.

“What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?’

And this Labor Day Ghost keeps walking. She’s still here. Waiting for the next line to be sung back to her.

For the community makes us strong.

As Bob LaFollette got up in that wagon to speak in 1897, “The Wisconsin Idea” was already coursing through the blood of the German immigrants who stopped to listen. The war on those most vulnerable was already going on. And if the people in this photograph somehow had the power to peer into the future, perhaps they’d gaze at February 2011. Right now. Today. And think to themselves, “Will this war ever end?”

The Wisconsin idea is so simple that it’s greatest danger lies with those who skim over it so fast that they don’t really absorb what it says. The Wisconsin idea envelops public policy, education and politics. But at its heart is this little pearl, the commitment “to insure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefitting the greatest number of people.”

Bob LaFollette was “The Wisconsin Ideas’” greatest advocate. And if he were still with us today, he would be the one at the front of the battle lines, drilling into the minds of even the most rabid, drooling dog barking at the legions of American’s least likely to take care of themselves—all those imaginary “welfare mothers,” all those fictionally lazy “unemployed”, the sick, those who serve the government, the military, the war veterans, —drilling into their minds that the drunken sailor spending that got us here simply will not be paid back by those least able to afford it.

“Ensuring well constructed legislation aimed at benefitting the greatest number of people.”

LaFollette would be pounding the message, the Wisconsin idea, in ways that made “The twitter” quiver and Facebook tremble.

Because the guns aimed at this idea represent an even greater threat than the negotiations over who gets how much money, the ugly slanderous talking points aimed at government public servants, and all the sleazy, “big lie” internet messages that foul the telecom highways of the world like litter out a car door that forever remains on the side of the road every single time someone presses “Send” and extends the life of another piece of garbage.

Here’s why—when you kill an idea, you kill the origin of the thinking that kills the possibility of a better future. In doing so, you kill everything from a healthy life, to a roof under which you can sleep, to food on your table. You kill conversation, honest debate, and at the very end of this list: you kill the potential for leaving the world better than when you found it.

Yesterday, thousands joined the protests in Madison, the state capital. The newly elected Governor issuing a statement saying, “It’s simple. We’re broke.” A much easier statement to swallow than the rest of the story:

So what we’re going to do about it is first demonize public employees and take away their collective bargaining rights. If you want me to be direct? We’re gonna crush the unions. We will dance on the grave of Bob LaFollette. We will take aim and start carpet-bombing the Wisconsin Idea. With visions of shock and awe. Because if we can crush the vulnerable in Wisconsin. we can do it anywhere.

The Wisconsin idea. “Legislation benefitting the greatest number of people.” Note what is not in that phrase.

Nothing about class warfare.

Nothing about republicans and democrats

Nothing about the media or the sex and drugs and payoffs to congressmen.

Nothing about The President causing all the problems.

The Wisconsin idea. Currently under attack.

What would Bob LaFollette do? Attack back? Bite a blogger? Tweet somebody? Keep quiet and do nothing?

Or perhaps ask the question,

Can you really kill an idea?

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She was walking out of the back room of his jewelry store buttoning up the burnt orange cashmere sweater I had bought her on my last trip to her little town outside Kansas City. Harry the Jeweler was right behind her.

He saw me first and he put his hand on her shoulder as if he knew exactly where to touch to make her head rise. I could almost feel the current between them. His face ready for trouble. Her blue gray eyes clouding up with innocence as she smoothed the thighs of her jeans.

“Roger, you’re ah early,” she said. I wasn’t expecting you till tonight. And what are you doing here anyway? I mean I just stopped by to say hi to Harry. He got some new diamonds in and. . .”

“Oh, no big deal. I got off work a little early and the traffic out of Chicago was good.”

Our life had been driving and cheap second tier holidays since the beginning. That’s what happens when the loving is long distance. The holidays gave us markers for our trips. Then came the road.

The best trip was the first one. Maybe that’s why looking back, even after all these years, I can’t even hear one whisper of a regret. No regrets. No tears goodbye. Neither of us were the crying types. Especially not that first trip.

There’d been snow that year. And if you’ve ever driven Highway 57 between Chicago and Champaign Urbana Illinois on a blue sky, wind across the snow fields day; it’s just how you’d imagine Antarctica. Just the endless oceans of blinding white snow and the clear blue sky. And nothing else. The miles of telephone wires and the fact that the road was paved, the only clues that there had once been other people here. Perhaps to make a movie called “Snow Planet Nine,” or “The Blizzard that Ate My Dog.”

My pal Eddie and I. On our way to see Will and Betsy. She was taking more classes at the U of I. She was always taking more classes somewhere. And Will had a job at the Air Force Base. They lived in a tiny one story house on the edge of a cornfield—now of course a snow field. And we were all at that time of our lives when we had all done school but we had not yet done life.

Eddie had a girlfriend somewhere on campus. And Betsy had told me that she had this friend who would be by. They were both receptionists in a doctor’s office. I remember asking her on the phone if they both wore really tight nurses outfits to work and her answering deadpan that mostly they worked naked because clothes were a symbol of the oppressive medical establishment. And then I didn’t think much about her friend again at all after that.

Besides there was the deal with Eddie’s 1969 red Ford pick up with the rusted out hole in the floor, the oil leaks and the habit of often going about 50 miles before sputtering over to the side of the rode for one reason or another.

But we did get there. Giant piles of snow like castle gates to their driveway. A flag pole stuck in one and a rippling white flag, scrawled in black magic marker THIS WAY TO THE BEER.

Inside Will and Betsy’s kitchen. Out of the down coats, which piled together were the size of a small car. The warmth of the room radiating with Will and Betsy’s glow in starting a life together. Jerry Garcia’s guitar burbling warm springs of flowing music bouncing gently off the walls that kept out the cold.

“Come hear, Uncle John’s Band. . . .”

And when that warmth reached what I thought had to be a peak, the back door opened and Teresa walked in.

And if in some other writer life I could come up with a line better than the great John Cheever’s, ‘This is a woman who could stop time just by taking off her sweater,’ I would use it to paint the picture of the instant connection I made with her soft, smart, laughing blue eyes.
When you’re just starting out to live your life, you often have the feeling that there must be some other place you should be. So after hanging out in Betsy’s kitchen for awhile, all of us piled into our mounds of electric colored, goose down coats and scampered over to campus where we went ice-skating at an indoor rink.

Making lazy sweeping circles around the ice rink with Teresa. She was from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Which to me, having grown up in Chicago and never really lived any further than Wisconsin, was like being from Casablanca or the French Riviera. Add to that the accent. A southern woman reading the phone book, to me, conjures up visions of eternal bliss living under the warmth of a million Carolina suns. A Faulkner character who somehow ended up happy. I remember her saying, with an innocence I’d never known, “I just finished this book? It was called Ulysses? By James Joyce? Did you read that book? I was just wondering what you thought?” And then proceeding to match me all through that weekend beer for beer, telling stories of the Gulf Coast that would make seasoned sailors howl.

The snow kept coming, so when we got back to Will and Betsy’s we all thought it safest if Teresa spent the night. Eddie was gone to his girlfriend. I insisted Teresa take the couch and I wrapped myself in blankets on the floor.

The next morning Will and Betsy doing an exaggerated tip toe walk out of their bedroom pretending to be quiet, walking past Teresa and I now both on that floor—the couch empty.
That was our first Valentines Day. That morning. Waking up warm on the floor next to Teresa.

And there wasn’t a holiday for the next two years that didn’t involve a long lonesome highway with her at the other end. That time when she called me up, this was after 6 months or so, maybe it was Arbor Day or something, and said, “Roger, I want to come see you in Chicago. But I don’t think we should have sex.”

I had no idea how to respond to that. We talked for awhile. Skirted around it. And I said, “Hey, let me call you back, there’s someone at my door.”

And I did what I always did when life tossed a problem I couldn’t handle. I called my Aunt Mavis. And my Aunt said, “Tell her, OK. You want her to come visit anyway.”

“But I. . . we’ve already. . . .”

“Yeah. I know. Just tell her.”

So I did. And we didn’t make it past the wall of my front entryway before she decided to change her no sex plan.

Valentines Day, Flag Day, every holiday imaginable. Memorial Day found us following blue dawn trails through the Smokey Mountains. Driving into Asheville. Looking for the grave of Thomas Wolfe.

One July Fourth I even loaded up the big rig U-Haul to drive her to a new life in that little town outside of Kansas City. A hot summer day. Looking down at Will and Betsy from behind the wheel of the big truck and Will saying up to me, “You don’t have any idea how to drive one of these do you?”

Me smiling down at him “Not a clue! Seeya!” And then almost ripping out the clutch.

It was the next Valentines Day that I got into town and accidently ran into her at the jewelers. Truth told, I had felt a distance in that soft, smart southern voice when we talked on the phone. And not having a whole lot of plans, other than to be Thomas Wolfe, I thought it was time to maybe grow up a little. She talked about her friend the jeweler a lot. How they’d go fishing together. Do small town stuff. The closest I’d known to that life had been fantasies of settling down in Mayberry, from the Andy Griffith Show on TV. But then coming to believe I’d end up like Ernest T. Bass, my favorite character. A guy who liked to throw rocks through windows.

Teresa and I liked to think of ourselves as not the jealous types. So the jeweler didn’t bother me. No sir.

In fact I’d even buy the engagement ring I was going to surprise her with that Valentines Day—I’d even buy it from him.

And I almost did. That’s why I had stopped in the store.

On that second Valentines Day. Worst one I ever had.

It started when I saw her walking out of the back room of that jewelry store.
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The Kepler Telescope is a planet seeking satellite. And yesterday, as the Kepler glided on through deep space, continually searching to see if we here on earth are alone, the Kepler Mission Control team announced the discovery of 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars.

A discovery that could triple the number of known stars.

From this new discovery, 54 of the new planets could be habitable. All this from a satellite that is patrolling only 1/400 of the skies.

Reported in the New York Times, Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of technology said, “For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets. This is the first big step to answering the ancient question, “How common are other earths?”

And as this new light from distant stars shined on our own tiny little planet, it’s likely that the visionary storyteller from Waukegan, Illinois, Ray Bradbury, heard the news too.

Perhaps the news prompted a story. Like the one Bradbury tells when people ask him why he became a writer.

It was the Labor Day weekend of 1932. Bradbury was intrigued by a Carnival Tent on the shores of Lake Michigan advertising a magician who called himself ‘Mr. Elecrico!”

In Bradbury’s own words:

“Mr. Electrico was a fantastic creator of marvels. He sat in his electric chair every night and was electrocuted in front of all the people, young and old, of Waukegan, Illinois. When the electricity surged through his body he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row below his platform. I had been to see Mr. Electrico the night before. When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, ‘Live forever!’

I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?”

The next day, young Ray Bradbury went back to that tent and managed to get a private conversation with Mr. Electrico. Bradbury continues:

“He then walked me down by the shore and we sat on a sand dune. He talked about his small philosophies and let me talk about my large ones. At a certain point he finally leaned forward and said, “You know, we’ve met before.”

I replied, “No, sir, I’ve never met you before.”

He said, “Yes, you were my best friend in the great war in France in 1918 and you were wounded and died in my arms at the battle of the Ardennes Forrest. But now, here today, I see his soul shining out of your eyes. Here you are, with a new face, a new name, but the soul shining from your face is the soul of my dear dead friend. Welcome back to the world.”

Welcome back to the world.

As the great writer Bradbury heard the news of new planets discovered by Kepler, perhaps he wasn’t surprised at all. Perhaps the next story to come burbling up through his timeless soul began “Welcome back to the world.”

Perhaps Bradbury read the scientists’ quote on ‘KOI 157’, for ‘Kepler Object of Interest.’ KOI 157 is another Sun. And as the Kepler team studied the way newly discovered planets circled this ‘new’ sun, they likened these orbits to an old vinyl record. Spinning around an old turntable.
Light from distant stars and the spinning of a record on a turntable.

I wonder if Ray Bradbury smiled, remembered, dreamed and then said to himself out loud:

Light from distant stars and the spinning of an old record on a turntable.

Today I’ll write a love story. Maybe even one that will live forever.

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