Next week I turn 70. I can now fully live into the grumpy, cranky old man persona I've been cultivating the past few years.  One of the joys of aging, as someone with diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic heart failure, and who knows what else, is regular testing of my blood, urine, and ... um... bowel movements. Sigh. The latter is what resulted in this cranky old man chronicle. Now I've been having such tests for years. No big deal. But this year my health insurance company suggested a specific brand named test. It advertises on television a lot, with a happy little talking box ..read more

“This Is My Song (January 7, 2021)” This is my song, O God of my dear nation, a song of peace for this loved land of mine; this is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine: but other hearts in this land are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine. May truth and freedom come unto this nation; may peace abound where strife has raged so long; that each may seek to love and build together, a land united, righting every wrong; a people united in love for freedom, proclaiming peace together in one song. O hear my song, thou God of this d ..read more

Dear Senator Braun -- When I read your recent tweets about objecting to the Electoral College Vote awarding Mr. Biden the presidency and the Indianapolis Star's report that "Indiana Republican U.S. Senator Mike Braun on Saturday said he will object to President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory when Congress meets to certify the election results on Wednesday. ... Braun, in a joint statement with 10 other sitting and incoming Senate Republicans, said the 2020 presidential election "featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud" and called for an emergency 10-day audit of the el ..read more

This is the time of year I love living in the Midwest, more than summer, spring or winter, which each have their own charm. But fall has a particular beauty. The landscape is alive with wonderful color, and I don’t just mean the trees in places like hilly, forested Brown County, Indiana. I mean the fields and woods that adorn the countryside. The sunlight is softer, this time of year. And this softer light is golden, transforming the ordinary into extraordinary, helping me see the richness of life around me. That’s why I love taking Nancy for rides around Indiana at this time of year. We ..read more

 Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker Right off I have to confess that Nicholson Baker is one of my favorite writers, both of fiction and non-fiction. I first encountered his writing when I read the astonishing Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization. The research that went into the making of that book and how he constructed it amazed me and drew me in. I've given numerous copies of it to friends. Traveling Sprinkler is my favorite novel of his (so far).  So when I heard Baseless was going to ..read more

 Midwest by Stephen Dunn After the paintings of David Ahlsted We have lived in this town, have disappeared on this prairie. The church always was smaller than the grain elevator, though we pretended otherwise. The houses were similar because few of us wanted to be different or estranged. And the sky would never forgive us, no matter how many times we guessed upwards in the dark. The sky was the prairie's double, immense, kaleidoscopic, cold. The town was where and how we huddled against such forces, and the old abandoned pickup on the edge of town was how we knew we had gone too far, or ..read more

The day is breaking grey and chilly. Some leaves are still clinging to the trees. They rustle back and forth in the light wind. Persimmons are ripening on the branches out by the prairie. Hopefully, we’ll get some of them before the deer eat them all. Squirrels are busy stashing walnuts and hazelnuts and acorns. I walked out onto the back deck to feed the Ebony, Bamboo, and Gracie (the farm cats) and they greeted me with great meowings and fell to their food as if they hadn’t had been fed in days. As if I didn’t know they’d been out mousing or chipmunking or birding in the prairie and h ..read more

 Yesterday, after spending most of the week in Zoom meetings for board's I serve on, I needed to get out from in front of a computer screen. So I told Nancy I was going to fire up the pick-up truck and head out for a ride. "Wanna go with?" She did and so off we went on the backroads -- Gasburg Road, Joppa Road, Bunker Hill Road, and many more. We didn't talk much -- mostly just looked at fields that had been harvested, that needed harvesting, and were being harvested. We saw big combines working their way across cornfields, trailing clouds of dust and spewing field trash. We witnessed oth ..read more

First, let me say that for the past four years I have been completely disturbed and horrified by many of the words and actions of President Donald J. Trump. And that's the last time you'll see his name in this blog post. However, as voting is going on now and through November 3rd, I cannot be silent about policies, words, and actions I find contrary to my understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am committed to working against these things which I feel are harming the country I live in and am grateful to live in.  No politician is perfect. All have their faults. That's been tr ..read more

After walking through the slowly fading, quickly browning prairie yesterday and observing the various seeds -- including the fluffy thistle ones -- I read this poem on The Writer's Almanac.  Why There Will Always Be Thistle by Maxine Kumin Sheep will not eat it nor horses nor cattle unless they are starving. Unchecked, it will sprawl over pasture and meadow choking the sweet grass defeating the clover until you are driven to take arms against it but if unthinking you grasp it barehanded you will need tweezers to pick out the stickers. Outlawed in most Northern states of the Union still ..read more