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?

“We pledge allegiance to the flag,” we children chorused at the start of each school day. I don’t recall questioning the meaning of allegiance. Even as an adult, I find it complicated to define. Allegiance involves the duties basic to a relationship with something or somebody, whether chosen or inherent. It and its synonyms—loyalty, faithfulness, commitment—mean honoring those obligations through thick and thin.

Lately, we hear about individuals’ loyalty or disloyalty as if it’s the prime qualification for public office. Is it, or should it be? To abandon solemn obligations on a whim or for personal gain is unworthy and in some cases criminal. That’s the easy part. The more challenging question is, loyal or disloyal to what?

Most of us have multiple loyalties we take seriously. We may be loyal to a partner, a friend, an employer, a movement, or a nation. We may be loyal to our ethics or our faith. The challenge arises when two loyalties collide. What gets priority when a pledge of confidentiality confronts an obligation to prevent serious harm? What happens when commitment to conscience conflicts with duty to obey the law?

These don’t always have easy answers. Individuals have left their posts because they found the clash of loyalties untenable. Military personnel, members of Congress, and others swear to support and defend the Constitution. That obligation outweighs any other political loyalty, no matter who claims otherwise.

Image: Grove Valley Elementary School, Oklahoma City OK, Facebook, June 14, 2025.

          The twenty-fourth of May’s
          The Queen’s birthday.
          If you don’t give us a holiday
          We’ll all run away.

Around our house in the 1950s, my father sang this ditty from his childhood to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” It referred not to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II but to Queen Victoria, who died eleven years before Dad was born. Victoria Day is still a Canadian federal holiday, observed the Monday before May 25 in many of the informal ways Americans observe Memorial Day a week later.

Why Victoria? Reigning from 1837 to 1901, she was the longest-ruling British monarch until Elizabeth (1952-2022). Those years saw tremendous societal, political, and industrial changes. Much work that had once been a family enterprise moved outside the home for a growing, urban middle class. Home was seen as a place of respite from the sordid outside world. Gender roles solidified. Talk of sex was taboo (though discrete prostitution thrived). Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, held up the ideal of the perfect family.

Last month the royal family marked the hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth’s birth, April 21, 1926. I can’t help but wonder how future generations will look back on her era.

Image: Heinrich von Angeli, portrait of Queen Victoria, 1875, in Royal Collection Trust. Cropped.

I lack expertise in international relations, but my personal relationships have generally been positive and deep. Good luck, good choices, and good models all helped. I’m conflict-averse but not conflict-avoidant; that’s to say, I’ll raise issues but strive to resolve them without a fight. That means moving away from winners and losers, away from who’s right and who’s wrong, in favor of creative solutions everyone can live with.

As a young parent, when children blamed each other for causing a mess, I told them I only cared how we were going to fix it. I much prefer problem solving over punishment, revenge, or finger-pointing. Even in disagreement, two people who care about each other both want the same thing: We each want us both to be happy. Figuring out how to make that happen takes collaboration.

In Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (1981), Roger Fisher and William Ury describe a process focused on underlying interests, rather than the specific outcome each party demands. If you want to return to the lakeside cabin because you love beaches, and I want to go somewhere new because I crave variety, let’s brainstorm solutions like finding an unfamiliar vacation spot with a beach.

Whether between individuals, political parties, or nations, I doubt unconditional surrender often brings lasting peace. That may say more about my temperament than objective fact. I do believe that understanding another’s viewpoint and letting everyone save face accomplishes more than preening in one-sided victory. Too bad not everyone has the willingness or the skill.

Image: Baja California Sur, Mexico, 2018. Photo by Chris Sabor on Unsplash.