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Back to school, with my biker gang

8/23/2018

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Charles City Press, 8-23-18

​With school starting this week, please drive carefully and be on the lookout for biker gangs.

They’re bold and stupid, just like you were once.

I know this first hand. I was in a pretty wild biker gang in the 70s.

We didn’t have a cool intimidating biker-gang name, like the “Hell’s Angels”, the “Sons of Silence” or the “Highwaymen.”

We didn’t really have a name at all, and that’s too bad. But give us a break, we were only about eight years old.

If we had a name, maybe it would have been something dumb and non-intimidating like “The Elm Street/Oak Street Connection.”

Yes, we were kids in small town Iowa in the 1970s— a place and time where they would tear down all the trees and name the streets after them.

I lived on Elm Street, on the corner, where Oak Street curled up and into East Line Drive. East Line Drive was a trucker’s bypass, and people drove really fast there, so we couldn’t take our bikes that direction.

That was fine — you had to go uphill to get there anyway. Uphill was a lot of work.

The school, on the other hand, was a few blocks away, and it was mostly downhill. Smooth biking, toward the school.

There were a couple of obstacles. First, the bottom of Elm Street ran into 12th Avenue — which had heavy traffic in the mornings on school days. That could easily be avoided by driving our bikes through the neighborhood yards — much to the displeasure of the nice neighborhood ladies and gentlemen who tended to those yards all summer long and didn’t like a bike path slicing through their well-manicured grass.

We knew this, but we drove our bikes through their yards anyway. They couldn’t stop us. Not only were we a biker gang, but we were way too fast for them. By the time we got to the bottom of Elm Street, we were a multi-wheeled living entity in a jet-powered vacuum surrounded by a whooshing sound.

None of us wore helmets. What were helmets? We’d never heard of them. Some of us took a baseball card, or maybe a playing card, and stuck it into our spokes, so our bikes sounded like they had little engines. Our bikes whirred. And the faster we rode, the higher-pitched the whir.

We were all good kids, as individuals. There was Brian, my best chum in those days --  he and his 97 brothers and sisters lived a couple houses up from me on Oak Street. There was Todd, who lived a couple houses further up. There was Doug, who lived at the top of Oak street on Todd’s side.

There was Tom, who lived across the street from Doug and Todd. There was Mike, who lived just down from me on Elm Street. And there was Jimmy, who actually lived one street over on First Street  — and was actually one grade younger than the rest of us. But Jimmy was adaptable and seemed to fit right in with his Oak and Elm Street partners.

That was the main group, but our numbers varied from day to day. Occasionally a brother or sister would join us on a temporary tour — or some others who lived on the fringes of the neighborhood. Everyone was welcome — but not everyone had the heart for it.

After turning right on 12th Avenue, we were just one block away from our biggest obstacle — Highway 3.

There was no avoiding it, unfortunately. It was impossible to get to Wings Park Elementary School without crossing busy and hazardous Highway 3.

Instructions came from all those who cared about our safety and well-being.
When you get to the STOP sign at Highway 3, you stop. You get off your bikes. You wait for a break in the traffic, then you carefully walk your bikes across the highway. Once across, you can get back on your bikes, then ride them the rest of the way to the school.

This was excellent advice, which we all memorized — then ignored.

Stop at the STOP sign? Get off our bikes and walk them?

That may have been the safest way to do things, but it seemed unnecessarily inefficient to us. Besides, there could very easily be some angry, yard-tending neighborhood ladies and gentlemen chasing us for driving through their yards. If we stopped, they might catch us.

Rarely did we stop. Rarely did we get off our bikes and walk them. We knew it was the right thing to do and the safest thing to do — but when you’re in a biker gang with a bunch of 8-year-old buddies, you’re kind of in a whirlwind. You go where the whirlwind takes you.

I’m not advocating this behavior — it was stupid. But when you’re eight years old, mass stupidity is often mistaken for boldness. And we were nothing if not bold.

We did have time to judge the traffic as we approached the highway, and so we would adjust our speed accordingly and find our spot — the break in the traffic big enough for all of us to scoot across the highway, veer over to Elwood Parkway and bolt toward the school, which was now in plain sight.

We were supposed to come around to the front of the school, but usually we sped through some more back yards and onto the school playground in the back.

We’d coast up the sidewalks to the parking racks, pull out our bike locks, secure our bikes and laugh together as we strolled up to the school doors, telling exaggerated stories about our latest ride.

I often kept unofficial time on my Mickey Mouse watch. Most days, Mickey’s pointing fingers told me we’d made the trip to school in under five minutes. I’d share the time with my biker gang friends, and I kept a journal in my notebook at my desk, documenting our fastest and slowest days.

Of course, autumn would turn to winter after about a month of school, and our bikes would be in the garage for most of the school year. When the weather got colder, we’d walk. When it got really cold, we’d carpool. Neither of those was nearly as cool as being in a biker gang for five minutes every morning.

A few years later, most of us got mopeds. A couple years after that, we all got cars.

And yes, as young Americans, there’s a lot of fun involved with obtaining a driver’s license and sitting behind the wheel of a car. It’s a rite of passage, it’s a step toward becoming a full adult. It’s a symbol of personal freedom.
​

But it will never compare to the joy of being eight years old, bold, stupid, and in your own biker gang.
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Some essential lessons with the nephews, about shooting and life

8/16/2018

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Charles City Press, 8-16-18

“Don’t pull the trigger, just gently squeeze the trigger. When you pull the trigger too hard, it jostles the gun a little and changes your shot.”

That was me, Uncle James, teaching his young nephews how to shoot at the Grob Getaway vacation last week.

It was one of the many family fun festivities we all participated in.

The vacation included roasting marshmallows while singing songs around a campfire, among many other things. The nephews took Uncle James to school on the ping-pong table, but their Uncle James and their mother teamed up and dominated on the bean-bag field.

There were rides in a horse-drawn cart and some interaction with nature — as well as a few trips to town to explore shops and a brewery. Time had been set aside to do some fishing, but unfortunately, that time was dampened by a sudden thunderstorm, so their Uncle James and their grandpa, Papa Butch, did some fishing on our own later in the week.

And of course, there were the aforementioned shooting lessons.

It was just a B-B gun, because the nephews are still a little young to be handling a real gun. Maybe in a couple of years it will be a 22 rifle or even a small shotgun. The B-B gun had been a Christmas present for both nephews from me eight months ago. It was of the Red Ryder variety, similar to the one in that Christmas movie where the goofy kid with the glasses constantly gets told that he’s probably going to shoot his eye out.

There weren’t going to be any eyes shot out with Uncle James around, that was clear. I insisted that, even though it was just a B-B gun, it would at all times be handled safely and correctly, as if it were a real gun. The nephews heard this and wondered if Uncle James had lost his mind, but then looked to their own dad, who nodded seriously and agreed that Uncle James was right. The message was clear — real gun or toy gun, it doesn’t matter — if it isn’t handled safely and correctly, there will be no gun, because it will be taken away.

Of course, I had to test the thing out first. I nailed the bulls-eye on the first shot, then had to show off and nail it several times in a row, just to impress the nephews and convince them that their uncle knew what he was doing. It worked, they seemed impressed, and they listened better.

Later, I missed a few shots. I’d like to say that I missed on purpose to show my nephews that even good shots sometimes miss, but the truth is, I just missed.

“Get your elbow up, parallel with the ground,” I said to a nephew as he lined up his shot, and as I said it, I remembered my dad — their Papa Butch — telling me the same thing when I was their age.

Guns have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I have cherished that. My family bonded through hunting and shooting, and I sometimes wonder if I’d even know my cousins or my own uncles had we not gotten together throughout my adolescence and young adulthood every weekend, every fall, every year, to pursue ducks on the Mississippi Flyway; pheasants, quail and partridges in sloughs and picked cornfields; and deer on the wooded edges.

Though the ultimate goal was eventually killing something and eating it, there was so much more to it than that. Stories were told, life lessons were learned, recipes were exchanged. Puppies were born, raised and trained into hunting dogs. Those hunting dogs were also family dogs, and those family dogs were beloved as they aged — and mourned when they died.

We learned how to talk with farmers and convince them we could be trusted on their property, carrying guns among their cows. And those cows — well, let’s just say that we learned that sometimes cows are mean.

We also learned that guns are dangerous things, to be respected and handled correctly, never to be intentionally or inadvertently pointed at another human being. If you did that at one of our hunting outings, you lost your gun — and the respect of your hunting party.

Guns have been always used to commit crimes, obviously, but it pains me to see the trend that’s developed over the last 20 years — guns being used by young people to kill other young people in schools. I am from a family of teachers — and am married to a teacher — and everyone I know, at one time in his or her life, has been a student. It makes me angry, with the school year about to begin, that I have to worry about people I love getting shot at a school.

Say what you want about the next generation, complain away about how entitled and naive and coddled they are, but keep in mind that these young people are among the first to ever have to legitimately worry about getting shot and killed just for going to school.

This says much more about our generation than it does about theirs. Collectively, we’ve failed at our most important job — teaching our young people respect for others, respect for life and respect for themselves.

I won’t go into the whole gun control debate, because there are far too many people on both sides of the issue shouting obscenities at each other and accomplishing nothing, and it gives me a rage headache.

And the thing is, both sides of the debate are wrong — sometimes they’re just a little wrong, sometimes they’re stubbornly, stupidly wrong — but they’re all wrong.

There are a whole lot of things we can do about gun violence and school shootings, but they never get done, because everyone who isn’t dying is busy screaming.

That’s a bad example, and that’s what’s wrong. The solution starts with a good example.

My nephews are young, and they’re impressionable. They watch their mom and dad closely — and their Uncle James, their Papa Butch, their Nana Lois, their Aunt Michelle — and they don’t know it, but they’re looking for lessons. What they see in us is what they learn.

By the end of the vacation last week, my youngest nephew had hit the target nine times out of 10 shots.

He kept his elbow even, he gently squeezed the trigger, and most importantly, he handled his B-B gun safely and correctly, as if it was a real gun. He never intentionally or inadvertently pointed it toward another human being. If he’s like his Uncle James, he’ll remember that shooting lesson for the rest of his life.

Thanks to his mom and his dad and his Papa Butch and his Uncle James and all the others, my nephew respects guns, and more importantly, he respects other human beings.

I know that it’s just a start, but I’ve done my job here.

Now you do yours.



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Camping isn’t what it used to be, and that’s good

8/2/2018

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Charles City Press, 8-2-18

I’m taking a few days off next week.

It’s a family vacation, at a cabin in the woods in Minnesota. My parents, my wife, my sister, brother-in-law and nephews are all going to be there.

My daughters won’t be able to make it this year, distance and job requirements are keeping them away. I’ll miss them, but the Grob Trip into the wilderness will still be fun. We try to do something like that every other year.

We won’t be roughing it. The cabin is essentially a modern home, with all the modern conveniences. Satellite television, wi-fi, a full kitchen with all appliances, air-conditioning, a rec room with a ping-pong table and a movie room with a projection screen. Heck, it’s better than home. There will be all kinds of fun things to do, inside and out.

There will be fishing and playing outdoors, hikes through the woods, scenery, grilling meat, a campfire, horse-and-buggy rides, maybe some tubing, and tours of area wineries and breweries.

Camping has changed since the old days.

When I was a kid, back in the Dark Ages, my parents once got it into their heads that our family would enjoy becoming campers. They bought a little pop-up camper, I assume with some rare extra money that could have gone to a color television and video game console for their son who loved them, and dragged my little sister and me to campsites in godforsaken places all over the Midwest, almost every summer weekend.

I have mixed emotions about our family camping quests, and I’m certain one of the reasons for that was that it rained quite often.

And when I say “quite often,” I mean “always.”

It is not an exaggeration when I tell you that, the first summer we had the little pop-up camper, it rained every single time we went camping. It didn’t matter what the forecast was, it didn’t matter what the weather trend had been in the days leading up to the weekend — the minute we found a spot to camp, backed in, popped the camper up and started to build the campfire, the skies would rumble open and release torrents upon our heads.

This is the truth — once I overheard my parents discussing a “get-rich-quick” scheme. They were honestly considering scanning through newspapers — there was no internet to search then — to find stories of areas in North America that were suffering from drought, and offer up our services to those locales. For a reasonable fee, we would pull our camper to the drought-stricken spot, open it up, and within a few minutes the drought would end with a downpour.

That’s how certain rain was whenever we camped out.

This means we missed out on all the best parts of camping. There was no hiking in the woods, no swimming at the beach, no fishing in the stream. No telling stories or singing songs around the fire, or roasting hot dogs or marshmallows and turning them into s’mores. There wasn’t even charred meat cooked on a grill.

There were lots of card games, on the little table in the camper, me —about age 10 or 11 — versus my little sister — about age 6 or 7. While it’s true that a simple deck of playing cards was the original multi-purpose entertainment center, you can only push that premise so far before it gets annoying and tedious. I’d let her win until I got tired of it, then I’d beat her and make her mad. When I made her mad, the games came to an end. All the while, raindrops echoed above our heads. The flat roof of the camper made light rain sound like hard rain — and hard rain sound like the alarm that let Noah know it was time to build the ark.

It wasn’t all bad. There were occasional breaks in the rainfall, when we could get outside and enjoy the wet wide world. I learned that trout like to bite just after a rainstorm, and I managed to occasionally catch some big ones with my dad. Sometimes we’d head to the nearest little town and find something we could do indoors, like bowling or a movie. Because my parents felt bad for taking us out in a monsoon, they were quite generous when the time came to buy us some treats, snacks or gifts. When it was too rainy for Dad to grill meat, Mom could improvise and create some pretty tasty stuff on the little mini-kitchen stove in the camper.

Surrounded by the great outdoors, but sentenced to our little camper, we learned how to make our own fun. We learned how to make each other laugh.

That little camper is long-gone now. I don’t know what happened to it, but hopefully it was burned to ashes. Thinking of my experiences with that camper, I’m reminded that my wife often talks about “love languages.” People have all different ways of expressing their love for others, she tells me. It’s from some books and articles she’s read.

For example, sometimes one’s preferred love language is giving and receiving gifts. Someone else’s love language might be work and service — you labor or create something for the people you love, or simply perform tasks like mowing the lawn, cleaning the house or cooking them food.

My wife tells me that she believes my love language is primarily verbal — I tend to prefer to give and receive kind words — spoken or written.

And sometimes it’s not words — sometimes it’s laughter. I often like to express my love by making others laugh, and I like people who can make me laugh.

For what it’s worth, I think I might have developed that love language in that awful pop-up, all those years ago. We were a family of four, cramped in a camper, trapped in the amber of the moment, and we had nothing to do but try to entertain ourselves and each other.

There was only a deck of cards and our wit, our words and our laughter. That’s it. That’s the only love language we had available.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being sentimental. If I could magically go back to that place and time for a while, I most certainly would not. I also wouldn’t wish those experiences on my most despised adversary. I still wish we’d have gotten a new color TV and video game console instead of a camper. Trust me, those trips were horrid.

But then again, I’m choosing to take a few days off next week, and choosing to get into a cabin with the rest of my family.

Granted, the cabin I’m headed to is much bigger and has far more modern luxuries than that old pop-up camper did.

But my family is a lot bigger now, too. I know full well it’s still going to be a little cramped in there when we’re all together.

So maybe there’s a part of me that wants to go back to those wet and wretched camping trips, when my family and I desperately found ways to laugh through the misery.
​

Because, you know, there’s always a chance of rain.

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