Or, Home Just in Time
On our way to Nancy’s annual eye examination at the University of Iowa Hospitals, both a good-bye and a hello sent us on our way. Chuck was invited to preach at the Celebration of Life for Wayne McKinney, a valued parishioner for every Rector of St. Luke’s for the last three quarters of a century. I had usually enjoyed his support and, when I didn’t, I learned a lot from his wisdom. His and Virginia’s daughter, Mary, was a student in one of my classes at UNL when I taught there while I worked on my Ph.D. It was a privilege to help Mother Stephanie lead this celebration, helped by Frs. Rick Moon and Jerry Ness and Deacon Colleen Lewis.
That was the good-bye of course. The hello, however, also arose out of a death, the death of our good friend and a fellow priest, Mike Churchman. At the celebration of his life at Trinity Cathedral (we were back from trip two too late to be present), our daughter Noelle took the opportunity to lunch with JoAn Van Balen. JoAn and Mike had been our near neighbors, he the Rector of St. Peter’s, Lexington, when I was Rector of St. Luke’s, Kearney. Thanks to Noelle, we were able to contact JoAn, now living in Des Moines, and arrange to have lunch with her and, as it turned out, her oldest daughter Sarah.
Both JoAn and Sarah are creative artists, Sarah also a dancer, both humane and spiritual people in possession of themselves. We have some of their work hanging in our home and a piece greets you on entering our son George’s. The lunch was a time to catch up on a friendship for too long allowed to be dormant, and we enjoyed a good long conversation over a lovely spread of homemade gazpacho soup, baguette and cheese, and berry dessert. Such a great “hello”—so happy she lives on one of our annual routes!
Have to say that JoAn’s gazpacho had to compete with the delicious home-made chicken pot pie and apple pie we had eaten the evening before with our daughter Noelle and her family, their home in Cedar Bluffs (just outside Fremont) often being a first-night-out stop for us on our travels. The lunch held up well in the competition!
The eye examination has been an annual event since Dr. Lind here decided she didn’t want to do Nancy’s cataract surgeries without a thorough look at the “freckle” on her cornea. She’s had it all her life, but Dr. Lind had a point and it was confirmed by Dr. Alward on our first visit. We knew the seriousness of it when he first used the word melanoma! The issue, however, is entirely whether the freckle/melanoma grows or not. It never has, but if it should then its extraction, a fairly simple surgery, becomes more difficult. The principal activity of the examination is a set of thorough measurements. It has always remained the same!
Dr. Alward is in the process—slow if the hospital has its way—of retiring. Last year he introduced us to Dr. Sears and entrusted Nancy to his care. Since this is a teaching hospital, the doctors are often joined by internes, students, or fellows, and this year Dr. Sears was joined by Dr. Rubin. She and he both noticed that while there was no change in width there might be some change in height. There’s a margin of error in the measurements and so, until they are sure, they want her to return in six months, then again six months later for our usual annual visit. If no change is noted, we’ll go back to an annual appointment; if there is a change, we’ll probably stay an extra couple of days while they—here’s the medical term: “pluck” it out. We appreciated both their cautious approach and their concern. None of us is alarmed but we are glad to follow their lead in this. Nancy really felt good about her new doctor.
This hospital, incidentally, is the one you may have seen on television. A window in the ward for the most severely ill children faces the football stadium for the Hawkeyes. At a certain point in Iowa’s home games, they line the kids up at the window and the fans and players give them a big wave. College sports these days is often full of inane customs—this one seems a really good one.
Iowa City (or Coralville, which is where we actually stay) boasts a lovely pedestrian walk. Its main library is actually along one side. On the other is the Bread Market, a fine deli that serves good coffee, sweet rolls, and assorted soups and sandwiches. Our son and daughter-in-law, George and Laura Grace, introduced us to it last year and we gladly revisited this year.
However, unlike many hospitals in which I’ve been a captive eater, the University of Iowa Hospital enjoys the very fine Melrose Cafeteria, also good in the same ways as the Bread Market. Such a dilemma. We solved it by having lunch at the cafeteria and dessert at the market.
Two other draws are the Hamburg Inn—great kind of burger and shakes diner—and a restaurant right on the Iowa River with a good menu and view. Our “spot” however, as it is in Dubuque and Topeka as well, is a very good Longhorn Steakhouse just around the corner from our motel and its 100-foot water slide. No, we don’t go down it! But it is fun to watch from both the pool and the hot tub.
Our one excursion: a short tour of the old Iowa Capitol, with a display of some of the documents, photos, and a chamber as it would have looked in the days before those rascals in Des Moines built the golden dome.
Often, we’ve headed out of Iowa City on I-80 to just past Davenport and then caught I-88 on up through Ronald Reagan’s home town territory and come into Milwaukee from the south. This year, though, we headed up around Cedar Rapids, over to Dubuque, then around Madison, and into Milwaukee from the west.
At one time we took that route often but apparently not often enough to remember that heading north there are no visible restrooms from Dubuque to Madison. Some are heralded on the highway, but can’t be seen from the road. Fortunately, the “by-pass” around Madison—seemingly always under construction at some point—is much better, and as soon as you reach I-39 North, its just a short drive to I-94 and Cottage Grove—with both a nice little coffee shop and a kind of “super” service station and, in either event, restrooms!
When we were renting a condo for the whole month of August, with a fairly involved entry ritual (park, get buzzed in, go to condo floor, dial in a code for a lock box, open the condo, pick up the garage door remote and condo key, put back the key from the lock box, take the elevator back down, drive around the property or block to the garage entrance, park in the assigned spot, get a dolly, and take loads up the elevator to the condo.
To prepare for this rigamarole, we always stopped first along the Lincoln Memorial Drive by the lake at a Colectivo coffee shop and found that coffee and a roll steeled us adequately for the ordeal. In fact, after that stop, it no longer seemed like much of an ordeal at all!
Even though that condo was sold and we’ve been staying in hotels of late, the custom of starting with a stop at Colectivo survives…and this year it worked well for when our kids and their kids’ schedules made it best for us to arrive at their home. There is hardly any welcome in the world as warm as these grandkids clamor when Nanny and Poppy first arrive.
Our biggest mandates this year: see Laura Grace and Greta before they took off for a couple of days at the boundary waters with her brother and cousin, take 5-year-old Huck to the “shark restaurant”—Jimmy’s Island Grill in the Radisson Mayfair where we were staying, get 10-year-old Will to his football practices at one of Milwaukee Lutheran HS’s practice field, baby sit then 11-month old Louis and take him to Endaris Park playground, pick up kids from their “PAL” summer programs at school, and join the “Dude Ranch” (the Peek boys without the girls!) in a trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum. Lots of fun, too, when the girls got home…playing Uno and Go Fish, hearing about seeing a bear, seeing Will’s amazing collection of baseball cards, and watching Huck manipulate the garage door lifter to ride up with the door and them drop down. [This could become a national craze, kids; give it a whirl!]
We did it all, plus two pool parties at the Radisson! And at the same time made our daughter jealous by getting to Colectivo four times. All that even while getting in a lunch at Pandl’s in White Fish Bay, a breakfast at the Plaza Hotel, hitting spaghetti night at Balistreri’s, eating Linguini da Mare at Maggiano’s and grilled oysters at Jimmy’s, and discovering that Sendik’s Grocery carries City Market cinnamon rolls. Seemed like the week there went all too fast, but we’ve started planning a holiday family party!
We left Milwaukee early on the 23rd to get to La Crosse in time for a mid-morning coffee with Jack McSweeney and Janice Wiebusch, Kearneyites who summer in La Crosse. Enjoyed seeing the Tom Sawyer restaurant and the marina seen from its balcony and meeting Jack’s old army buddy and his wife from New Jersey en route to San Francisco.
From there, we ground our way through Minneapolis/St. Paul during a Friday “let’s all go somewhere for the weekend, maybe the State Fair” traffic—grind seems a trite description until you are pretty well grounded for about two hours and for a good 30 miles outside the city—on our way to a little subdivision of Clear Lake, population 512, and a motel in nearby Becker.
In August of last year, my cousin Dottie’s son and his wife Lynnea and their family took up the challenge of new jobs nearer where Lynnea had grown up in Scandia. She found work in a St. Cloud Hospital, they found schools in Becker and a home on Camp Lake, and Gregg has one job and has started back to school in the field of medical technology. They brought my cousin with them and she is ensconced in a basement apartment with a chair lift on the stairway.
Of all my cousins, Dottie always had a special place in my life. When Dad left for the Navy soon after the declaration of WWII, Mom and I moved in with her parents, Doctor Charles Clyde Urie and Lena Hail Urie, his southern bride from Arkansas. My old colleague in the Teaching Faulkner sessions lives in Batesville where Nana grew up and knows some of the descendants of the family who stayed home. He was a Colorado Republican, she an Arkansas Democrat, they voted in every election, effectively cancelling out each other’s preferences but exercising the chief responsibility of citizen in a democratic republic. I spent from years 1 to 5 in their home at 1865-10th Avenue, just across the street from then Colorado State Teacher’s College. It President, Dr. Frazier, used to take me out of my chicken-wire fenced sand box and take me on his walks.
At the same time as we moved in, Mom’s sister Margaret and her husband Art were posted to Grand Lake, where, at the time, there was no high school. Their oldest daughter, Dottie, moved in with the Urie’s as well, for all the years of her high school and one year of her college. She, and her sister Mary when she would visit, were the relief team for taking care of Chuckie after I’d exhausted the resources of one grandmother, one grandmother, one mother, a cleaning lady, and six nearby godparents. Dottie would come home from school and Mom or Nana would say, “Oh, Dottie, take Chuck and read him a story” or “take Chuck for a walk” or “find something to do with Chuck.”
Mary and Dottie were both smart gals, Dottie in science, Mary in humanities. Mary graduated 10 years before me from McCook High School, and was featured in a choir pictured in a mural near one of the two entrances. Their Dad, Art Link, was a Civil Engineer, eventually with the Bureau of Reclamation. If you’ve driven through the I-70 tunnels in Colorado or enjoyed some of the Frenchman-Cambridge watershed lakes around McCook, you’ve seen Art’s work. He was also a champion cribbage player and a great gardener. Still, when Dottie wanted to become a chemical engineer, he discouraged her—it was no place for a woman. She did the next best thing and earned her living as a dietician until she later married Ray, a Petroleum Engineer. Both girls graduated from what was then Colorado A&M.
I was touched by finding a poem I’d written about the Uries taped to her bedroom door. “We’re the last to remember,” she said, all the other principals to the story being gone. (At the usual think-tank lunch I enjoy most Fridays, Dick Jussel asked what we felt had changed with our aging. “Too many funerals,” offered Earl Rademacher, long time VP for finance at then KSC, now UNK. There were just four of us that particular Friday and two of us were headed to two different funerals. Dottie’s comment hit home.
We had been greeted by a wonderful BBQ ribs, corn on the cob, summer squash broiled with cheese, and beautiful salad dinner that Greg and Lynnea had fixed the evening we arrived. Dessert? S’Mores from their fire pit. I’d been in China when they married, so son George and Laura Grace had represented our family at their wedding. We’d never met Lynnea and so enjoyed getting to know her. They are both deeply involved in Riverside Church nearby. We only got to see them that one evening because they had other house guests, a friend of Lynnea’s from Billings, and were taking her and her kids to Minneapolis the next day for the State Fair.
The best part, then, was we got to spend a whole day with Dottie. She fixed us lunch in her apartment, we took her to dinner at Charlie’s in Becker and gave her a tour of Clear Lake—everything is all quite new to her yet. And in between we caught up and exchanged stories.
At one point, Dottie and I were talking about Papa’s flowers. I recalled mostly the gladiolas down the side of the house and how he’d dig up the bulbs in the fall, store them in the basement, and replant them in the spring. Dottie recalled Papa’s 100 rose bushes, calling them his “other family.” Then she added, “You remember, Chuck, what he said to the woman who mistook him for the yard man.” But I didn’t remember. I’d either never been told or was too young to let the story register.
Papa would come home from his dental practice, change into the same old work clothes he fished in and used for yard work, and go out to take care of the other family. A woman came by and watched him work for a while. She asked him if he’d like to take care of her yard and garden. No, Papa didn’t think so. “Well,” she asked, calculating what it would take to lure him into her hire, “how much do they pay you here?” “They don’t pay me very much,” Papa replied, “but I get to sleep with the lady of the house.”
Maybe my Aunt Margaret was more likely to tell that story to her teen-age daughters than Mom was to tell it to it to me, ten to thirteen years their junior.
Sunday’s drive from Becker to Minneapolis, without the weekend and State Fair traffic, took about 35 minutes, landing us early for seeing old Western Literature colleague George Day at his assisted living quarters, a beautiful setting with plenty of spacious lobbies and hallways and a grand atrium off the entry. George’s son John, from Green Bay, and his wife were visiting and had taken George to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church that morning but were shortly back with him and Nancy and I got in a good hour’s visit before we needed to take off.
Lunch at Tumbler’s in Albert Lee where there’s good food, reasonable prices, a comfortably atmosphere, and a waitress with personality. A short delay caused by a terrible accident, but otherwise easy drive into Des Moines and our usual haunt there, the Holiday Inn Express at Drake and the Drake Diner, both of which we first became acquainted with a little over 30 years ago when I gave a paper at the O.K. Bouwsma conference that my old classmates Torgerson and Hustwit arranged at Drake. We stayed then at the motel that became the Holiday Inn and ate with Dick and Judy Wood.
I had not watched my messages closely enough to see in time that Jonathan DaLima, JoAn Van Balen’s son-in-law, married to Siobhan, had wanted to see if we could talk a bit about theater. My bad! Saw the message only as we arrived in Fremont for lunch with our daughter. Two weeks in her life leaves a lot to catch up on, so we had a good time together, drove to Cedar Bluff, picked up the Beemer we’d left there for them to have fun with while we were gone, and made it home in time for a nice walk at Cottonmill Park.
Rough guess, we were travelling 52 days this summer…great trips seeing wonderful people and enjoying lots of stimulating discussions, eating just a bit too much but not too too much. Wouldn’t have traded a minute of it—but, my, were we glad to get home, even to a lot of stuff that needed to get done and several projects to get jump-started.
October: politics, baby—challenge and crisis!
Kearney, Nebraska
September 2019
capeek 