On a warm Saturday afternoon in June of 1988, my dad mentioned he was going golfing with his friend Ron Robinson. He invited me to come along. My dad didn't golf much, back then he didn't, and I guess I really wanted to go, because my mom told him I couldn't, I had to say home and help her with my sisters--my brother wasn't home for some reason--and I started crying. I was ten, almost eleven, just young enough to still cry when I felt something was being withheld from me unfairly. "Next time you can go," she said. "But who knows when that will be?" I cried. She held firm though, and my dad, bless his heart, didn't contradict her. I stayed home, and Dad went to golf with Ron Robinson.
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As of this morning, close to 300,000 Iowa households were still out of power after Monday's storm. Storm is really an inadequate word--there isn't an English word that is. The weather people are saying derecho, but that's a Spanish word and I know Spanish too, and that word doesn't cover it, either. I'm a native Iowan, 43 years today, and I've never seen anything close. The damage is simply astounding, and it's every. single. street. from west of Des Moines to east of Davenport. Grocery stores are closed. Businesses, households and stoplights are running on gas generators, and the gas stations that are open can't keep up, and the gas lines resemble the pictures I've seen of the early 1970's. The best way I've heard it in words is "a Category 3 hurricane across the entire state".
It got 40 seconds on the national news last night. 25 of those were dedicated to crop damage.
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Turns out my mom was throwing a surprise 40th birthday party for my dad, and she needed me around to help prepare the house for it. That's why he was going golfing with Ron Robinson--it was all a set-up. Once she explained it to me that way, I calmed down. It had killed her to see my crying like that, but she obviously couldn't explain it in front of my dad. Ron's wife Mel came over and her and me and my mom went about setting up the house. A guy from the liquor store stopped by and dropped off a "keg". People began to arrive, but they parked across the street, at the City Park, so as not to tip off my dad. Relatives showed up from hours away. The garage filled up. I can still remember the look on his face when he opened the door to the garage. My mom got him, all right :).
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Last year on my birthday I had my iTunes play on random all day. There's this app you can download that tells you how many times you've listened to a song on your iTunes, and if I really liked a song, I checked it. If I had listened to it at least 50 times, with under 5 skips, I put it on a new playlist I titled "Birthday" and subtitled "The Best Fucking Music on the Planet". I kept it up while I drove Lyft the rest of the summer.
Today I'm listening to that list for the first time, on shuffle. I consider myself open to new things, but 90% of these songs were created sometime in the 1990's. I lived 13 years before then and twenty after, but there's just something about that music...
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Yesterday Niko was talking about, if he got into Spanish 3 on his placement test, he would maybe be able to go to Spain or Costa Rica after his sophomore year, and stay with a family and see the sights. I think he was trying to see if I would approve. I told him there was no substitute on this beautiful green Earth for travel. He asked me how long I was in Venezuela for. I said four and a half months. He had trouble conceiving of that. He asked if eventually, you just felt normal there. Yeah, I said. The electricity would go out once a week, you had to have a pail of water in case the water was off, the shower wasn't always warm, but you just get used to it. During elections, I told him, the military would be on the streets with machine guns and I didn't even think twice.
"Like Portland?" he asked.
I thought about that. "Kind of," I said. "But in Venezuela, they had their names on their uniforms."
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On April 1, I started noting in a journal the Coronavirus numbers:
- World: 891,514 confirmed cases/44,295 dead
- U.S.A.: 205,172/4,540
- Iowa: 549/9
Today:
- World: Over 20,600,000/Over 750,000
- U.S.A.: 5,217,094/166,100
- Iowa: 50,167/954
People say you can make statistics say whatever you want. But I don't know any other way to read those numbers except with a profound sadness.
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Back when my mom planned that party, I remembered her writing out what looked like Christmas cards, but it was May. She wouldn't tell us what she was doing. They were invitations for my dad's surprise party. There was no internet, no cell phones, no Facebook, Snapchat, Tik Tok. And yet my mom got over 50 people to hide in a garage in northwest Iowa at a given time on a given Saturday in June to celebrate my dad's birthday. I have all that crap, and all I want to do is get Mexican food and watch a movie. I'm not sure if that says more about me or the times.
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A teacher friend called me today to talk shop, and she dropped a name of a new teacher in our district, expecting I would know it. When I didn't she said. "You know her. You taught her."
"In second grade?"
"Yes. We both did."
It's actually worse than that. There are three former second graders of mine in our District this year. Jesus Christ.
Take care everyone. See ya next year!
