'How and Why' I Read

By Mary Reiman

So why do I love to read? For me it’s about finding that one phrase that speaks to me. Yes, sometimes it is simply one phrase, one sentence, or even just one word. Isn’t that amazing? One phrase that makes me say I LOVED that book. It inspired me. It helped make me think differently. It gave me courage.   

I did not grow up in a house filled with the classics. However, we had the “How and Why Library” set a salesman sold to my mom in the '50s. (Yes, she also purchased Encyclopedia Britannica in the '60s). That set of ‘How and Why’ books opened up a new world to me. One volume was mythology, one was science and my favorite was literature, which included the poem my sister and I memorized, ‘The Swing’ by Robert Louis Stevenson. (“How do you like to go up in the swing? Up in the air so blue. Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do!...")

Since I was reading long before technology ever allowed me to keep my favorite quotes on my phone, I would often write those phrases in blank books or journals. Of all the things I did not keep when I moved from house to house, I did keep those partially filled journals. Many years would go by without reading them, but I knew they were there. 

One of the happiest moments of retirement is that I now take the time to go back and read those thoughts, those reflections, those phrases. And they conjure up the memory of where I was when I was loving those sentences - where I was physically, where I was mentally and where I was spiritually - the state of mind I was in that led me to have those ‘if I could only write like that’ moments. 

Sometimes I read to learn about the lives and thoughts and feelings of others. Sometimes I read to envision other lands and places, and sometimes to have my own world reinforced (windows and mirrors). I read to gather new ideas, or to take solace when I cannot articulate something at the moment but an author's words express what I am feeling. My favorite quotes change over time, actually with every new book comes a new favorite! Does that happen to you?

As I write my blogs, I’ll probably always include a sentence or two from the book I'm reading at the moment. They have framed my world, my story, and I hope in some way they will speak to you. My favorite one today is “People don’t come into our lives by accident.” from Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate. More thoughts about that sentence in another blog post!

I believe we’ve all found phrases that guide and sustain us. What are your favorites? 

Landmarks: Light and dark

By JoAnne Young

I’m headed up North 27^th Street on some big box shopping trip and even before I hit that certain block, the one before the long overpass, it happens. It always happens. 

The memory flood. 

I barely have to look as I pass it; if I did I wouldn’t see it anyway. It’s not there. 

Instead of the landmark I have held in my head for decades, there stands a Lincoln Water System building, long and white and blue. 

No matter. What I conjure is the white house someone built on that land decades ago, and inside it a staircase with a wooden railing that I leaned on when I got a first kiss from a young man. A first kiss that would tie me to that staircase and that house and that block on North 27^th for decades to come. 

That’s how it is with landmarks, those touchpoints in our lives, in this town or another, that burn themselves into our personal stories and remain.

I lived in this town through college, then other towns, and eventually the young man and I returned with three little ones. I planted myself in a journalism career, he in broadcasting, as we marched through two decades of work and parenting, with the accompanying PTA meetings, seventh-grade band concerts, and many an hour as gym rats. 

Time brings plenty of life-affirming landmarks: houses, schools, parks, neighborhoods, grocery stores. 

It can also bring darker ones that naturally manifest from 35 years of reporting. I’ll burden you with a few. 

In 1992, an 18-year-old university student, Candi Harms, was returning home from an evening visiting her boyfriend when she was stalked, kidnapped, tortured and killed in a chill-soaked field outside Lincoln. 

And so a couple of my landmarks, albeit shadowy ones, are the bungalow where one of her killers lived at the time on South 52^nd Street, and the apartment parking lot at 61^st and Vine streets where her life took its horrible turn. When I pass them I think of that young woman with so much life ahead of her. 

There are others: 

* An area on the Antelope Creek bike path just blocks from my house, a storm-drainage tunnel under 48th Street that I cannot walk through without thinking of the teen who was beaten, stabbed and buried there by another teen who lived in a group home two blocks the other way from my home.

* A16-acre enclave of aging mobile homes, buttressed by commercial buildings on busy North 27th Street and the city's wastewater treatment plant. Home – at least it was 15 years ago -- to low-income people, immigrants, elderly men and women seeking refuge from high rent, written leases and security deposits. I replay that story each trip by. 

* The old, sometimes musty smelling, Lincoln Public Schools District Office, where I walked halls and sat hours upon hours at school board meetings, and in particular at the round table in the office of Associate Superintendent Marilyn Moore for engaging talks about student issues. A new, not musty smelling building sits there now. But I will always see the pre-May 30, 2011, rambling LPSDO stalwart, and then the smoldering burnt-to-the-ground remains of it. Superintendent Steve Joel called it a “total loss.” Not from my mind.

I'll leave you with one more, a bittersweet landmark that combines the news side with the personal. One also given up in heat and flames, and remembered in vivid detail.

The memories of Ideal Grocery, another 27th Street marker, where I would grab one of those vintage wire carts and walk familiar aisles -- I can recreate them almost perfectly -- picking out breads, pastas, cookies, and fruits and vegetables placed in paper sacks that assistants would then weigh and mark. The visit would end at those old-style check-out counters and friendly clerks. 

It's been four years since those beloved visits ended with that fire, and I still catch myself once in a while thinking, "I'll just can head over to Ideal. Oh ... wait."  

For good, bad or ugly, these places remain in my history and my memory. They delight or they haunt. 

But they matter. 

Who Will Tell the Story?

By Marilyn Moore

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past two weeks of the final moments of the musical “Hamilton,” as all the characters of the play, Alexander Hamilton’s family, his friends, his colleagues and enemies of the political time, gather round to sing the lament of who lives, who dies, how much time does one have, and who it is who will tell your story.  A complex man, remembered in bits and pieces for accomplishments and failures, by those who survived him, by those who loved him and those who did not.  The final line of the full company, “Who tells your story?”  

That question, who tells the story, rang through my mind as the impeachment hearings were held, first in the House and then in the Senate.  Testimony was compelling, at times, and at other times, not so much.  Legal arguments were engaging, solid, brilliant, and totally without foundation – depending on the speaker and, as importantly, the listener.  It was days and nights and days of hearings, information overload, and still seeming to miss just one critical fact…and what that fact was, depended on the listener….  It was everywhere, it permeated the airwaves, the front pages, the late night talk shows, conversations with friends and colleagues, Twitter, Face Book, and every other communication channel we know.  And then, with two roll call votes in the Senate, it was over.

It’s not over, of course.  The ramifications and consequences will be seen and felt for weeks/months/years to come.  New information drops daily.  In the immediate aftermath, federal employees are punished for complying with lawfully-issued subpoenas.  A book will be published soon, and others will follow.  References to the hearings will play out in ever-increasing volume in the next ten months as we nominate and elect a president.  The characters in this real life, at-this-very-moment drama, will be praised and condemned, glorified and vilified, as the story is told over and over and over….by thousands of story tellers, including those running for office, those who support those running for office, those who write and broadcast the news, and, in their heart of hearts, every single person who steps into the polling place next November.  It’s a story that hasn’t ended, and won’t end.

And whose story is it?  Is it Donald Trump’s story?  Nancy Pelosi’s?  Adam Schiff’s?  Mitch McConnell’s?  What about Colonel Vindman, or Marie Yovanovitch?  Is it their story?  Well, obviously, yes, this story belongs to all of them.  But it’s a bigger story than any one person, or even all of the named persons.  At its heart, this is our story, the story of all of us who claim the United States of America as our country.  It’s the story of our Constitution, our form of government, our understanding of the powers of the president and the limits on that power, our sense of right and wrong and honor and truth.  And right now, in the middle of all of it, we’re a people of shouting and clamoring voices.  Sometimes I want to be part of the shouting, sometimes I want to hear a single, clear, definitive voice of truth and justice, and sometimes, I just want to shut out the noise for a moment, just a moment…. 

This is a story that was pretty much destined to be exactly where it is at this moment.  From the beginning of the House investigations, it seemed likely that the House would impeach, the Senate would not convict, and then we would be emotionally exhausted, but with an election before us.  So why do it?  For many reasons, which have been stated well and with conviction by those who made decision along the way.  From my perspective, another reason is to put into the public record the events of the story, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, thousands of hours of testimony, all available for those who twenty years from now, or two hundred years from now, will tell this story.  Those historians, the story-tellers in the coming decades, will be telling this story – our story – and they will do it from a vantage point we can’t possibly know.  But we can shape that story, through our actions as citizens and voters, and in that way, we tell our own story.

One old gray t-shirt: Recalibrating after mom and dad are gone

By Mary Kay Roth

Tucked away in the far back of one of my bedroom dresser drawers, I keep an old gray t-shirt, fairly nondescript, faded and frayed.  But every now and then I take it out, hug it close and simply breathe in.

I have hesitated telling people about this ritual, because frankly it sounds a bit weird. The shirt smells musty and musky, no intrusion of store-bought fragrance, just a timeworn and familiar scent of masculine. It’s my dad’s shirt, and the moment I inhale I can feel his famous bear hug wrapping around me.

They say memory and smell are intertwined, the sense that most likely triggers remembrance. A whisper of marigolds takes me back to my grandma’s garden – a whiff of oil and gasoline transports me into the driver’s seat of my leaky, rusty first car. Out of nowhere, a random odor can send you hurtling back to a childhood memory and that t-shirt rockets me into my dad’s arms.

My parents died three years ago now, only a couple months apart, just shy of celebrating their 72^nd wedding anniversary. Of course, there’s fairly solid consensus that losing your parents – becoming an orphan of sorts – is one of the most emotional and universal human experiences. The grief of losing both mom and dad is a complicated beast that often presents a seismic shift.

So, after those god-awful first weeks of loss, I did the hard work. I read a stack of self-help books, clocked valuable hours in counseling and spent meaningful time under the covers. I followed sage advice: No shortcuts, I plunged straight through grief. I accepted all the yin and yang stuff about the depth of your sadness balancing the depth of your love.

Rest assured, adages are mostly true. This too shall pass, and time does soothe.

Then again. No matter how many books you read or hours you ponder – the keepers of your family memories, the custodians of your family history, are gone. I can never ask mom about the legacy of those mysterious table linens buried at the bottom of her cedar chest.  Dad can no longer laugh through tales of when he taught me how to water ski on lazy summer days. And nobody has a clue about all those strangers lurking in fuzzy, black and white photographs so carefully culled and collected.

The jolt of losing a mom and dad does eventually calm, yet at the same time it continues to deliver unexpected wallops – thankfully not a constant ache but more like unseen explosives unexpectedly tripped by ordinary, hum-drum events. Boxes of Russell Stover’s, poised innocently on store shelves, can knock the stuffing out of me, oh how Dad loved that candy. Yep, you’re pretty much ok, then suddenly out of the blue you catch a glimpse of something, the scent of something, sneaking up sideways, and you’re done.

Society tells us to keep busy and keep going, as we’re pretty much a quick-fix culture.  I’m admittedly something of a slow learner.  So, while I believe self-examination is good for the soul, there is a moment to recalibrate. Three years and my sadness feels as threadbare as dad’s shirt.

At some point you put away self-help books and tally up your collection of sacred blessings.  As years pass, memories and loss weave their way into the fabric of your life. You adjust, gracefully or not, on the far side of the divide. You stake your claim: Your parents lived, loved and, if you’re lucky, hugged. And in the end, you still have dad’s goofy messages stashed on a cellphone – mom’s final grocery list, left unfinished on the kitchen counter – and a treasure trove filled with family stories of love and resilience that will generally get you through the night.

After the loss of our parents, there will always be unanswered questions.  Unexpectedly and periodically, the finality of their departure will still smack us in the gut. And I’m guessing, here and there, we will need to readjust our settings – something like when our GPS gets all messed up – to follow our own true north.

Meanwhile, I still have that old gray t-shirt, tucked in my dresser drawer.