Iowa, the Knotty Pine and Thanksgiving

 We drove to Iowa last Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with my mom and siblings. Going over, we took a route through that crossed the Mississippi at Hannibal, then headed up through up through northern Missouri into southern Iowa. The land is hilly and not good for crops -- mostly pastures. Abandoned houses in various states of decay litter the landscape --rather than than tear down a farmhouse when they moved, the inhabitants just left.

After about six hours of driving, we arrived in Creston, a town of roughly 8,000 people. Dinner was at the Knotty Pine, on a hill outside of Afton, where we ate some wonderfully complex steaks and enjoyed the hunting lodge decor -- deer heads and pheasant festooning the walls while a stuffed wildcat perched on the bar.

While the turkey was cooking the next day, we went to Creston's deserted downtown. Bernings Café, once a local hot spot where all five of us Hall kids worked, is no longer in business. Even on a regular day, there isn't much going on downtown. Most of the stores are closed -- run out of business by Wal-Mart. I remember walking downtown on Saturday 40 years ago for a lemon Coke at Hansen's Drug Store after sighing over Bobby Sherman in 16 Magazine, shopping for bell bottoms at JCPenney's, and checking out books at the Matilda J. Gibson Library.

On the way home on Friday, we stopped in Eldon, the location of the house that was used in Grant Wood's famous painting American Gothic.We had our picture taken in front of the house in American Gothic garb -- fun (even though the picture didn't turn out very well).

Back home on Friday, we introduced Chelsea's boyfriend Chris, who had brought her down from Elgin, to the Springfield horseshoe. The horseshoe is a real gut-bomb, invented right here in Springfield. In a horseshoe, toast, some kind of meat, and fries are covered in cheese sauce. Sounds gross but it tastes great.Chris pronounced it "fantastic." Saturday was Chelsea's 22nd birthday, which we celebrated in style at a local restaurant with Emily and Jake (note -- no horseshoes were consumed).

Today after church we went over to Ron's folks for dinner and afterwords Chelsea and Chris checked out his dad's 3-D TV with dark glasses.  All in all-- a great holiday!

Unanticipated freedom and Lincoln Memorial Gardens

Intrepid photographer

It was very liberating to me when, last week, during the unseasonably warm weather we were having, Ron and I went to Lincoln Memorial Gardens. We live close to the Gardens and went there a lot when the girls were little, but we haven't been there lately. Now that Ron is interested in photography, we decided to visit again.

I took my scooter, assuming I could only access the paved trails, but when we started exploring I discovered, to my delight, that the scooter could go "off-road," handling the unpaved trails with no problem. This gave me a feeling of unexpected freedom and Ron took a number of pictures (see below).

Jens Jensen

This morning, a fog enveloped the yard and Ron decided to go to the Gardens again. I stayed home and found the following article in today's paper -- "Celebrating Jens Jensen, preserver of Midwest landscapes" -- interesting timing. Jensen designed the Gardens!

We are so fortunate to live near such a beautiful place, and I feel like it was an unexpected gift to be able to go on the trails. Life is full of surprises!

Lincoln Memorial Gardens Bay by Ron McDonald

Changes

As the parent of a 26-year-old daughter who is scheduled to marry an extremely nice young man in October,  I suffered a rude awakening when I began to help Emily plan the happy event.
 

1979 --Lena Hall, me and Julie Nelson

In 1979, when I married Emily's father we had a very modest wedding, even by Iowa standards. As the daughter of a frugal man, I wasn't interested in spending a lot of money on this event and besides this was still the era of hippies. Weddings were considered "establishment" and really cool people just lived in communes. My only sister was my (one) attendant and Bob asked a friend of his to stand up with him. The reception consisted of cake and punch in the church hall, followed by games and conversation on my parents' front porch. It actually was pretty fun.

Emily gets a kiss

In 1987, Emily was flower girl in October my brother Larry's wedding.  Was she ever cute!  She was an adorable flower girl, but shy -- halfway down the aisle, she broke away, ran over to my pew and buried her head in my lap.  Just too much for a 3-year-old.
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Fast forward to 2010. My first clue that things had changed was when Chelsea and I were watching a reality show called "Say Yes to the Dress." During the show, willing salespeople bring young women mountains of wedding dresses, which are then modeled by the girls for their mothers and friends. The show's drama comes from the angst that these young women experience as they try to figure out what dress to purchase. Invariably, the dress they love the most costs more than what they have intended to spend. I would not be saying yes to any of these dresses -- they're way too expensive to be to be worn once, regardless of the significance of the occasion!

Emily and Jake have selected a venue for their October wedding/reception and I am attempting to adjust my expectations to present day when six attendants are the norm and the reception could be a sit-down dinner for 150. It's a far cry from cake and punch in the church, but times have changed and I need to change too. They are a lovely couple and the wedding will be beautiful!

Jake and Emily

Tennis and heaven

Last weekend, Radio Lab featured a segment called When Am I Dead? containing a story called "Anyone for Tennis?" that particularly intrigued me.  In the story, British neuroscientist Adrian Owen talked about his research with patients in a vegetative state.

Dr. Owen said that when a healthy patient is given a verbal command to imagine that he or she is playing tennis, there is immediate activity in the brain. To see if patients in a vegetative state had similar brain activity, Dr. Owen tested a group of 20 patients who had been totally vegetative for several months.  When the first patient was put into an MRI and told to imagine that she was on the tennis court, there was activity in her brain. When she was told to relax, the activity stopped. Deep within her brain, the woman was "playing tennis."

Amazed, Dr. Owen concluded that at some level, the woman must still be "there." Only 2 additional patients out of the 20 showed similar activity, but Dr. Owen hastened to add that this did not necessarily mean the unresponsive patients were"dead"; instead, they might be deaf and unable to hear the cues.

The story made me wonder about quality of life for the first woman. What part of her brain was still functioning? What was her life like? What part of her was still residing in her body? No one really knows what it's like to be in a vegetative state. We don't know what kind of consciousness that person has or if they are still "there."

I believe that each person has a soul and, at some point, that soul departs from the body. But now, with the advances in modern medicine, the answer to the question about when a person actually dies has become murky. We don't know, because the definition of death keeps changing.

This kind of story makes me glad that I filled out an advance directive when the Terri Schiavo story hit. I do believe that, because of Jesus, I will go to heaven when I die, and it makes the idea of dying almost inviting, especially in the face of a future with a chronic progressive disease like MS. But, all that said, the decision to leave life is a wrenching one and not easily made. Life is God's ultimate gift to us, with all its many pleasures, and it is very difficult to leave.

archy and mehitabel and musings on the role of reporters

archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. Written back in the 1920s, the book is a collection of Marquis' newspaper columns supposedly penned by a cockroach named archy who would creep into the newsroom at night and painstakingly compose poems on Marquis' typewriter. Because archy wasn't strong enough to reach the shift key, the poems were all in lowercase letters. It was an intriguing conceit and archy was one heck of a poet for a cockroach. 

For example, in "the coming of archy"  he wrote:

expression is the need of my soul

i was once a vers libre bard

archy

but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach

it has given me a new outlook upon life

i see things from the under side now

thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket

but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it

there is a cat here called mehitabel i wish you would have

removed she nearly ate me the other night why dont she

catch rats that is what she is supposed to be fore

there is a rat here she should get without delay

Mehitabel was an extraordinary cat with a checkered past who came to be archy's friend (when he wasn't worried that she would eat him). Here's part of "the song of mehitabel" :

my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret

mehitabel

wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

the things that i had not ought to
i do because I ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai

boss sometimes I think
at our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay

There are few typewriters today and no place for archy in the newspaper world. Newspaper circulation and advertising are on the decline -- why subscribe or advertise if you can read the news for free on the web? But the web does not discriminate: some content is well researched and well written; other writing is inferior. It is up to the visitor to judge the value of what he or she reads.

Some might say that this is the way it should be -- that even the most impartial writer presents information that has a bias. However, I would prefer to get my information from a source that I knew to be well-educated and ethical. Journalism school teaches good reporting and writing as well as ethics. Some writers on the Internet are not so well credentialed.

Some of archy's observations are as true today as they were in 1927:

if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there