Out of Step

On June 10, 1952, the US Army Corps of Engineers dedicated its $45-million Harlan County, Nebraska, dam and reservoir. 

The all-day celebration drew ten thousand people from the Republican River valley. 

A huge parade in Alma, Nebraska, my home town, kicked off the celebration. A color guard led eleven bands, twenty-eight floats, a drum and bugle corps, ten saddle clubs, a fire department truck, and a line of massive construction trucks used to build the dam. 

My sister, Margaret, led the Alma High School band. I marched with it and carried a heavy glockenspiel, its bulky keyboard shaped like a lyre. When I hit its steel keys with a mallet, a bright bell-like tone sliced through the air. 

As we neared the end of the hour-long march, I spotted Dad standing in the crowd. Afterward, I scampered to him. "How'd I do?"

"Oh, you were terrific!" A smile played across his face. "Everyone was out of step but you."

YOUR PAIN

A favorite poem by my most-frequently-read poet:

ON NOT QUITE FEELING YOUR PAIN

How come your "horrendous"

never feels quite as God-awful

as the simply wretched thing

that happened to happen to me

Does that ring a bell? Let me know.

IS EVERYBODY OK?

The gooseneck lamp made a pool of light on my desk about 3 a.m., June 5, 1968, when someone pounded on my apartment door.

Tall skinny Bev, my upstairs neighbor, cried, "You've got to come up! They've shot Bobby Kennedy!" 

On Bev's TV, I saw the classic image of that night: Robert Kennedy, dressed in his black campaigning suit, sprawled flat on the kitchen floor, his limbs jutting out as though they didn't belong to him.

"Oh my God!" Bev shook her fist at the TV. "I can't believe this!  Martin Luther King only two months dead, and everywhere, rioting, thousands arrested, and who know how many shot! And now this." 

Bobby, still alive, asked, "Is everybody okay?" Bev reached for a tissue. 

HUNKER DOWN

Jimmy flew into Nebraska from New York when his Teamster contract with Dad's truckline lapsed on June 1, 1950.

And wouldn't you know it,  Jimmy wanted Dad to sign that same old Central States contract, the one with that terrible featherbedding clause they'd fought about in 1947 until "The Little Guy" dropped that clause.

Dad protested.

"Sign or strike," Jimmy said.

Dad, still unhappy with his 1947 contract that transformed his twenty-five drivers into Teamsters, decided to resist. 

He collected from his drivers all those union cards that Hoffa's contract had forced Dad to distribute. He returned them to the Teamsters.

Then my father hunkered down for a fight.

WEEPING WITH DELIGHT

I don't usually cry when I read the Omaha World-Herald. But Matthew Hansen's May 25th article, "They Covered Whiteclay," made me shed tears.

He wrote that the University of Nebraska's journalism school had just won a prestigious national award, a grand prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights journalism award. To win, the students beat out HBO, the New Yorker, National Geographic and every other finalist: a TV network, magazine and U.S. newspaper. No student had ever won this award before.

For such a victory, I felt like cheering, so why did I sit in my recliner in my living room, the newspaper on my lap, weeping?

The students won that award for their "Wounds of Whiteclay: Nebraska's Shameful Legacy." It focuses on that shameful 12-person town of Whiteclay, where four beer merchants sell 3.5 million cans of beer annually to desperately poor, addicted Oglala Lakota Indians living on a nearby reservation. http://www.woundsofwhiteclay.com.

To do this, the students, during the past year, "wrote stories, snapped photos, shot video and designed a website," Hansen wrote, while they also took classes and worked part-time jobs. Their high-powered professors challenged their students to go beyond "poverty porn."

I could imagine myself as one of those students working with the professors. In 1958-59 I was a journalism student at UN-L. My professors, and particularly Neale Copple, taught a kind of realism I hadn't known before.  "Copple demanded a lot," a student recalls, "he expected a lot. He had very high standards." Reaching, grasping, pulling myself up, I found capacities in myself that I didn't know I possessed. As these 11 students must have. 

So I wept in memory, but also with gratitude for Nebraska's farseeing journalism program.  When Will Owen Jones taught the first journalism university class in 1894, he inaugurated the same kind of professional expertise that I experienced and that so obviously motivated those 11 students. So I wept in pride.

A SPOILED BRAT

At supper, Dad cut a piece of meat loaf, popped it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed, patted his lips dry. "I treated that Senator Carl Curtis to coffee, and he said, 'Just between the two of us, that Bobby Kennedy sure is a spoiled brat. Doesn't have the patience to build a solid legal case against the men he's questioning. So he just engages in shouting matches.'"

Dad swirled a piece of meat loaf into its juices. His voice softened. "And guess what. Carl wanted to know if I'd be willing to come to Washington D.C. and testify on Bobby Kennedy's committee—against Hoffa.

Dad whooped. "I nearly broke his arm off, I pumped it so hard."

Just like that, I thought. A second chance to get back at that punk Jimmy Hoffa!

The Black Hole

Let me "take flight / From dismal," as Emma Lazarus wrote in 1881. But that's tough. 

My bipolar disorder leaves me dismally inclined; its medicine reduces mania more effectively than it lightens depression.

On good days, I can appear civil, even though I roil in pessimism. But if stress kicks in, I simply sink into a Black Hole.

So when I agreed to have cataract surgery on June 20th, panic spun me down.

Oh, no! He'll operate on the wrong eye!

Oh, no! The surgeon will sell me a newfangled fancy multi-focal intra-ocular lens for $11,000 that will blur my sight!

Oh, no! I'll go blind!

So this email from my friend Kira stunned me: "I had cataract surgery years ago, and it made a wonderful difference. You will enjoy seeing the world with new eyes!" 

What? Joy is a possible reaction to eye surgery?

From inside my bottomless pit, I could scarcely believe Kira's words. But they gave me hope. 

So I inched out of my wretched abyss, struggling to know how I too might "take flight / From dismal."