Our home is just off the highway between Green Bay and Door County. It is not unusual to hear a siren passing by, an ambulance going to get a patient, or bringing a patient to hospital, as fast as they can.
An ambulance passes as I read and write. Someone is in crisis, while I sit and contemplate life and death.
Such a luxury.
And now comes word that Jim Haney died on Dec. 2. Consider me officially knocked off the rails.
In the early days I would tell people I discovered Jim Haney, who was a year behind me at Ripon College. I saw the engaging fellow with the authoritatively resonant voice and recruited him to do a daily newscast on WRPN-FM.
Of course it’s silly of any one person to say they “discovered” Jim Haney. That bright, intelligent man was going to burst onto whatever scene he chose and own that stage. He was one of the most likable, intelligent and intentional people I’ve ever met, with a smile that made you smile. They chose a perfect photo for his obituary — that little twinkle as if we were sharing a special joke, just how I remember him.
Jim returned the favor three years later when he “discovered” me, or at least helped me get established as a newly minted college graduate. I was looking for an entry-level job in rural Wisconsin radio with limited success, but Jim had a summer job at WDUX in Waupaca, not far from his hometown of New London. He encouraged me to apply for the news director and put in a good word with the station manager. Even then Jim’s word was worth everything, and I started at WDUX the morning after graduating from Ripon.
And on that first day, he did me one of the great favors of my life. Before I went on the air, he showed me the name of the next town over from Waupaca, a name that widened my eyes a little bit: Weyauwega.
He looked at me with that special grin and said, “It’s pronounced Why-uh-WEE-guh,” saving me from an inevitably awkward moment when I tried to figure out the pronunciation live on the radio.
Jim went on to a memorable career as a professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, taking a break from that post to serve as communications director for attorney general and then governor Jim Doyle. I probably haven’t seen Dr. Haney since he left Doyle to go back to UWSP, which means 15 or more years, but it was always a pleasure to see him and I loved seeing his name when it popped up in my field of vision from time to time.
He’s the third unique individual from my WRPN days whose obituary caught me off guard in the last year or so. Wayne Davis was a walking encyclopedia, a great photographer, a tremendous wit and caring human being. Rob “Tex” Meyer, so named because of the ubiquitous cowboy hat, a truly original human, died a couple of weeks before Jim Haney, it turns out. All of them died too soon; my memories of them bring a smile to my face and an ache of nostalgia for what truly were good old days.
I find myself wishing I’d stayed in touch and making a mental list of people I really need to touch base with again, while I can.
Writing with a pen in a journal is a different exercise from writing at a keyboard — this almost silent scratching out of words in the old way, as Hawthorne and Emerson must have done, the words forming letter by letter from my hands — but I repeat myself.
Of course, if I write every day, I’m going to repeat myself from time to time over the course of a lifetime or even over the course of a few weeks, months or years exercising this habit. So …
Repeating myself: Refuse to be Afraid. Free yourself. Dream.
When fears claw at your consciousness, rein them in as best you can. Remember that fear is a way to control you, and ask. Who wants to control me, what do they want, and why? It will help to understand and empower you to go your own way.
Free yourself — choose yourself — give yourself permission — because freedom is a certain, unalienable right endowed by the Creator. That is to say, you were born free.
Dream. See the possibilities. “I have a dream,” the speech, resonates because it touches universal desires — to be left alone to pursue peaceful ambitions and make a better world.
I am reading a 1996 book called How, Then, Shall We Live? by Wayne Muller. It was one of a dozen books I grabbed from a table in a room at an estate sale, where everything you could fit in a bag was $10. So I bought this book for pennies; it’s a miraculous bargain.
Muller’s subtitle is “Four Simple Questions That Reveal That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives.” The four questions are Who am I? What do I love? How shall I live, knowing I will die? What is my gift to the family of the Earth?
I’m just past the halfway point, on the third question, and Muller has just shared an anecdote his friend Paul, who is in the final days of his life. Paul has accepted this reality but also wishes he had 10 more years so “I could really live as I always wanted.”
Muller asks what Paul would do if we could give him those 10 years.
“I would be kind. I would live my life with kindness. I would be kind to children. I would teach them to be kind, too. This is all I ever really wanted to do, just to be kind, to be loving.”
We all imagine how we might adjust our lives if, right this minute, we were told we would die soon, or within a matter of weeks or months, or on a specific date in, say, 2027. It focuses our attention on what’s important.
Muller recalls a question in the Bhagavad Gita: “Of all the world’s wonders, what is the most wonderful? The answer: “That no man, though he sees other dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.” It’s indeed a wondrous thing — and how different life would be if we felt, every day, all the time, the reality that all of us are going to die.
I have to believe this would be a kinder, gentler world. I have to believe we would be more fearless about living the lives we want to live. I have to believe most of us would try harder to live our best life, to be our best selves, and to be more patient with those around us who, after all, are just trying to live their best lives, too.
How shall I live, knowing I will die? We literally have a finite amount of time to work out the answer to that question. Best get busy.
I spent time Saturday morning catching up on the independent journalist coverage of the Freedom Convoy standoff in Ottawa, where the prime minister of Canada and the premier of Ontario continue to defy the people’s demand to loosen the chains they have put on their nation’s economy.
In a remarkable article by Rupa Subramanya that was posted on Bari Weiss’ Substack, “What the Truckers Want,” she noted that it’s not an “anti-vax” protest seeing as the vast majority (some say 90%) of Canadian truckers have received the injections for COVID-19:
“So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.”
Subramanya said she has “spoken to 100 of the protestors gathered in the Canadian capital,” in part because she lives nearby. “What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.”
As of Saturday the protest/strike has been nonviolent and isn’t stopping despite Big Government/Big Media/Big Tech/Big Pharma’s efforts to smear and misrepresent them. Many local and state governments, understanding the power of the people, have been lifting the mandates that provoked the protests — but the Powers That Be with the biggest stakes in keeping us under the boot, the Justin Trudeaus and Joe Bidens, are doubling down.
Biden’s handlers the other day urged Trudeau to use his powers to do what it takes to open up the Ambassador Bridge between the U.S. and Canada — and they weren’t talking about listening. I fear at some point the government will use violence to break it up, risking civil war rather than following the people’s will, as tyrants always have.
People toss around words like “communist” and “totalitarian” to describe the ideology of this ruling class, but I think “tyrant” is the most appropriate. The word is free of the political implications of communist or Nazi or fascist or whatever, and it names them accurately. They are simply tyrants who want to be in charge, and they don’t cotton resistance. It’s a weird world right now with these tyrants terrorizing everyone.
If “people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people,” then Justin Trudeau may be the most frightened person in the world right now. Frightened people often do stupid things; fair warning.
Andy Carpenter and I have a lot in common, although I have one bone to pick with him. He shares his life with a beautiful golden retriever named Tara, whom he describes as the greatest creature on Earth. This, of course, is a falsehood, seeing as it was my privilege to have spent nearly 12 years with the REAL greatest creature on Earth, Willow The Best Dog There Was (2009-2021).
Tara, of course, is fictional, having sprung from the mind of author David Rosenfelt, but she is also based on a real golden retriever named Tara who Rosenfelt describes with similar language. Rosenfelt may be forgiven his lack of understanding, since he never met Willow.
I haven’t completely recovered from the loss of Willow. She and I had one of those bonds you hear about, and snapping that bond has been as traumatic as one might expect. Red always joked that when the time came, she would have to euthanize me along with Willow because I would be so devastated. I’m glad she didn’t have to follow through on that, but yes, devastation is a good word to describe it.
But I digress. Beyond our love for the greatest creature on the planet, Andy Carpenter and I both grew up in New Jersey. If our family hadn’t moved from one side of the state to the other when I was 10, I would have attended Passaic Valley High School just outside Paterson, where Andy and his wife, Laurie Collins, live and work. When Carpenter talks about the morning traffic on Route 46, I know what he’s talking about, and even though I moved away 50 years ago, I can still see many of the locations in the Carpenter books in my head.
I missed Willow so much that when I realized Tara’s resemblance to her, I started binge-reading the Andy Carpenter series; sometime this week I will finish the 24th and will have to wait until July to hear the 25th because I’m caught up now. I’ve done it all via audiobooks, where Grover Gardner does an amazing job bringing Rosenfelt’s characters to life.
I’ve also read both of Rosenfelt’s non-fiction books about their house full of dogs (as many as 37 at a time) and the adventure of moving them all from California to Maine. And I’ve read the first of the new K Team spin-off books and am on the library waiting list for the second.
This is all thanks to my cousin Christine, who several years ago sent us an Andy Carpenter book knowing that I loved a certain golden retriever, figuring I’d be drawn to a character who loved a certain golden retriever. Red, who doesn’t read books as voraciously as I, loved the book, but for some reason I didn’t pick it until after we lost a certain golden retriever.
My cousin was right, of course. Besides the dog and Jersey connections, Carpenter and I are both sedentary types who want to retire but keep getting drawn back into the job. In his case he’s a defense attorney who keeps bumping into sympathetic characters who have been wrongly accused of murder. How can he say no? Actually, if I had inherited millions as Andy did, I might be inclined to say “no” more often than he does, but millions have not dropped into my bank account, so I can’t say for sure.
The real killer is always someone who is not quite whom we expected, and the final act often involves a potentially unpleasant encounter to unveil the culprit. Between Carpenter’s caustic personality and Gardner’s brilliant performances, Rosenfelt delivers an entertaining tale pretty much every time. Twenty-four thumbs up from me — or should I say paws up?
