Some things we do mostly for pleasure. No motivation needed. Others we do only to get them done; we’d skip the laborious process if we could. For those, my inner pep talks come from songs. “Keep your eye on the prize, hold on,” I sing to myself when I need a reminder the goal is worth the trouble.

Sometimes, though, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. When a project feels overwhelming, dwelling on end goals will distract and frazzle me. Writer Anne Lamott recalls her big brother’s panic, at age ten, over a school report on birds that was due the next day. Her father’s advice: “Just take it bird by bird.”

Two songs play in my head when I face such a challenge. One is Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler”:

     You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table
     There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done

The other is David Mallett’s “Garden Song,” later sung by John Denver, the Muppets, and Peter, Paul, and Mary:

     Inch by inch, row by row
     Gonna make this garden grow

These lines help me let go of the uncertainty and perfectionism that pull me off task. They help me stay in the moment and focus on the work at hand.

Image: Photo by James Nilsson on Unsplash.

I was probably about six when my big brother took me downtown to buy our mother a birthday present. We had a whole quarter between us. Roaming the aisles of Woolworth’s, we saw a rack of Life Savers in a host of flavors. Each roll of eleven cost only a nickel! We knew our mother liked the butter rum best. With a penny tax on purchases from six cents up, our quarter could buy four rolls of her favorite candy.

My brother had a better idea. He went to the clerk with just one roll of Life Savers. Before I could say we wanted more, he handed over our quarter, got four nickels in change, and hurried us out of the store. A few minutes later we went back in and bought another roll. By keeping each purchase small enough to avoid tax, we eventually took home five rolls of Life Savers instead of the four I expected. As always, I was in awe of my big brother’s brilliance.

Two classic rolls of butter rum Life Savers appeared in our kitchen recently, the first I’d seen in years. An image of my long-dead mother sprang to mind, the way a taste or smell or song on the radio can evoke a memory from one’s distant past. I’ve written about her before. While the Woolworth tale features us children, it’s still more about the mother who inspired us to get her the best gift our money could buy. 

My husband calls them comics on steroids. Hard covers and page count aren’t their only difference from the comic books I devoured as a child. Graphic novels (the term includes nonfiction in a similar format) often treat more serious themes and target an older audience. They’re started to gain acceptance as a literary form. A publication of the American Library Association in 2019 designated July as Graphic Novels in Libraries Month.

I might never have read a graphic novel if my book group hadn’t chosen Darrin Bell’s The Talk for this month. The biracial Pulitzer-Prize-winning editorial cartoonist begins his graphic memoir at age six, when his mother explains why he can’t have a squirt gun that looks like a real one. By the end, the adult Bell struggles with how to talk with his own six-year-old son.

Critics of graphic novels for students note their limited vocabulary and simple sentence structure. But for me, The Talk was deep, intricate, and thought-provoking. It took me inside a school kid’s shame at having been questioned by police, and his embarrassment when his white mother makes a scene about a racist incident. Bell’s character arc is compelling. Students who are regular readers may, like me, find it enriching to infer complex emotions from a blend of visuals and text. Students who read only graphic novels might otherwise not read at all.  

The things I take for granted! My thanks for daily blessings range from the love of friends and family to the joy of songbirds in the morning. They have never included such mundane conveniences as a working stovetop. Until last month, when the gas burners would neither turn on nor off.

What to do? Happily, we’re reasonably accustomed to sandwiches, cold snacks, and carry-out. We’re fortunate enough to afford an electric kettle for morning coffee. As for foods I’d normally cook in a skillet or saucepan, necessity is the mother of invention. Some experiments were more successful than others. Breakfast potatoes crisp even better in the oven than a skillet. On the other hand, even after pricking the shell to prevent an explosion, I doubt I’ll ever again try to hard-cook an egg in the microwave.

My gratitude list now includes a working stovetop and so much more. Thanks to the appliance techs who came out on a Saturday to check for safety, ordered the parts, and made the repair. Thanks to the workers who manufactured those parts and the truckers who brought them from the factory. The list goes on and on. Still missing are other blessings I haven’t thought of yet, because I still take them for granted.

Two-hundred-fifty years ago, former colonists renounced their allegiance to the British Crown and created a union of independent states, with ideals of freedom and equality. Titles of nobility were abolished. Citizens were to be equal under the law. For all its shortfalls, the Founders’ vision implied a far less rigid class system than in Downton Abbey (set 1912-28 in England), which I’m watching on library DVDs.

My father was a professor of sociology. As best I remember, he told me social class rested largely on ancestry, wealth/income, and either education or occupation (I forget which).  His salary was modest, his ancestry meaningless outside smalltown British Columbia, but West Virginians held education in high regard. When Dad met former students in the grocery store, they greeted each other with warmth and mutual respect.

The United States has never been a classless society, nor did the Founders intend it to be. The promise of America was the possibility of rising from one class to another. As a kid, I took it as given that each generation earns more than their parents did. That was true for more than 90 percent of Americans born in 1940. It held for only half of those born in the mid-1980s.

Today, rags-to-riches stories are rare. The household wealth gap last year was the highest since tracking began 37 years ago. While a soaring stock market helps the rich get richer, the poor get poorer under a crushing burden of debt. Whether to promote this or reverse it is up to us.

Image: Photos on Unsplash by (left) Louis Moncouyoux and (right) James Day.

In 1952, my parents bought their first house for $10,000 (about $125,000 in today’s dollars), five times my father’s salary. Prefabricated, made of plywood, with five rooms and a bath, it was part of the post-war boom that housed American families. Similar construction around us generated a child’s delight in dirt piles and frameworks. The walls of a neighboring house went up in a day.

​Demand for “starter homes” today far outstrips supply. Prices have risen much faster than inflation or wages. Thirty years ago, on average, buying a house cost a family about four times its annual income; now the house would cost seven times household income. First-time home buyers today average 40 years old, up from age 29 in the 1980s. Almost no one is building modest houses like the one I grew up in.

The reasons are complex; the solutions, obscure. Builders profit more by building grander houses, on larger lots. A big house costs little more to build than a small one, but it will sell for a much higher price to an affluent buyer. Restrictive zoning helps protect the value of those buyers’ new homes. It also eases the burden on local governments. Larger lots and older homeowners mean fewer school-age children relative to property tax revenue.

After my brother and I went off to college, our parents sold their plywood prefab and bought the house of their dreams across town. Home ownership in the United States is a classic building block of personal and generational wealth. It works best when people of modest means can find houses to buy.

Image: Mass produced houses of Levittown, PA, about 1959, cropped. Our edge-of-town neighborhood in West Virginia was much, much smaller, with one short street and a cul-de-sac.

Some folks say they hate change. Others claim to enjoy it. I always counted myself in the latter group. I like to explore new places, research new topics, and drive home by an unfamiliar route. When it comes to digital technology, though, I’m becoming one of those old people who can’t keep up with the changes and resent being asked to.

Technological change is as old as the hills. Sailing ships replaced galleys; steam replaced sails. Gutenberg’s printing press replaced rooms of scribes copying by hand. Gains in speed, cost, or capacity often came at the cost of people whose livelihoods depended on the older technology. Luddites in the Industrial Revolution smashed textile machinery that put skilled spinners, weavers, and knitters out of work.

Unlike modern stereotypes of the Luddites, I don’t hate technology as such. In high school in the 1960s, I joined the student projection crew to operate the reel-to-reel movie projector at a classroom teacher’s request. I appreciate being able to wash dishes and laundry by machine, drive a car to the store, and connect with far-away friends by email.

The difference between my projection crew experience in high school and my technological discomfort now—besides that I was younger then—is that the projector I learned to run as a sophomore was still the same my senior year. Today, no sooner do I acclimate to a platform or screen layout than it changes. Billboards from the San Francisco airport to my Oakland destination last week touted “AI-assisted,” as if technology were itself a virtue rather than a tool for some useful end. New? Maybe. Improved? It all depends.

Image: Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash.  

“Did you ever regret a decision you had made?” the Korean graduate student asked me across a casual restaurant booth. I was her informal local advisor. With an international scholarship to an American university of her choice, she had enrolled in a program near her fiancé instead of another better suited to her needs. Now she feared she had made a mistake.

I paused to think. “Little decisions, yes,” I said. “Like not taking an umbrella when rain was in the forecast. Big decisions, not really. They affect so much, I can’t begin to know what my life would be like today if I’d made a different choice.”

The rapper Drake popularized the acronym YOLO (“You only live once”) in his 2011 “The Motto.” Like the ancient Latin carpe diem (“seize the day”), YOLO suggests embracing opportunities. It implies willingness to risk embarrassment, failure, peer pressure, or the comfort of habit for the sake of personal authenticity.

We may never learn whether a particular choice was the “right” choice. In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” a traveler comes to a fork in the forest track. Choosing either path will mean abandoning the other. For years I thought Frost’s message was to choose “the one less traveled by,” the one that “was grassy and wanted wear.” Then I realized the next line said something quite different: “Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.” To avoid standing still forever, sometimes you must choose on no basis whatever. You may never learn where the other path would have led.

Image: Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash.

The Museum of Wisconsin Art recently named cartoonist Paul Noth of South Milwaukee to be the state’s first-ever Cartoonist Laureate. The New Yorker has printed more than 400 of Noth’s cartoons. In the thirty years I’ve lived in Wisconsin, I’m only now learning about the role of Wisconsinites in the history of comics and cartoons.

To boost sales of a Chicago paper in 1904, Reedsburg WI native Clare Briggs created the first regular, daily newspaper comic strip. Sidney Smith’s The Gumps in the Chicago Tribune (1917-59) made Smith wealthy enough to settle in a Lake Geneva WI waterfront mansion, with a statue of Andy Gump on the front lawn. In 1918, Frank King from Cashton/Tomah WI created Gasoline Alley, the oldest U.S. comic strip still running. Six years later, H.T. Webster from Tomahawk WI introduced the character Casper Milquetoast, whose name came to symbolize a socially awkward wimp.

The Western Publishing Company in Racine WI, publisher of the Little Golden Books, won exclusive book rights to all Walt Disney licensed characters in 1933. These came to include many of my childhood favorites, such as Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Mickey Mouse.

Fast forward to 1970, when Denis Kitchen of Milwaukee launched the Kitchen Sink Press, originally a counter-cultural artists’ cooperative. The press also reissued historic comics such as Al Capp’s Li’l Abner from the 1930s. The designation of a Cartoonist Laureate continues Wisconsin’s comic tradition. Can’t we all use a good laugh?

Image: Wisconsin comic artist Clare Briggs, 1922, cropped.

I used to get through long winters by fantasy-planning vacation travel for the following summer. One such vacation resulted for every dozen I “planned.” Nowadays, in addition to working jigsaw puzzles, I get through winter by planning my next trail walk. These less ambitious fantasies, for unfamiliar places within an hour’s drive from home, come true as the days get warm. First, I explored city, county, and nearby state parks. More recently I’m working my way down parts of the Ice Age Trail (see here and here).

Does joy mean the same as enjoyment? I find pleasure and enjoyment in jigsaw puzzles, restaurant brunches, and watching episodes of Downton Abbey. Joy is stronger; it’s closer to elation or delight. All my life I’ve taken joy in country roads and forest footpaths, wondering what’s around the next corner, taking literal steps to find out. On a beautiful day in a beautiful place, what could be better?