Bustling downtown Dows with the grain elevator in the background
There are many simple truths to be gleaned from a simple visit to the scene of your childhood. You need every so often to get in touch with where you came from and the roots of who you are. Dows is not the town where I grew up. But we played them in 4-H softball, and we won almost as much as we lost to them. It is a town near enough to my little home town to be a place that impacts who I am.
You have no idea what this is, right?
Day before yesterday we went to Dows for a dinner with relatives. My cousin and her second husband were there. Her parents, my uncle who still lives on Uncle I.C.’s farm place that has been in the family for more than a hundred years, and my aunt who is going bald a bit, were also there. We ate in a totally Pepsi-Cola-themed restaurant and had a Rueben pizza with roast beef and sauerkraut on it (talk about your total cultural potpourri!) The experience taught me a simple lesson. We come from a bizarre mixture of themes and things cooked together in a recipe for life that can never be repeated and cooked again for our children.
You don’t order Coke here.
We avoided talking about politics because Iowa is very conservative and none of us enjoy yelling at each other about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using fact-free Fox News talking points and cow poop about how building a wall that Mexico pays for will cure all our economic problems because we all think we know how Hispanics moving into Iowa are ruining our lives. So, instead, we talked about how Eaton’s machine tool manufacturing plant in Belmond is facing more lay-offs.
The restored and re-purposed Dows’ Rock Island train station.
We talked about businesses that have gone out and not been replaced in the little Iowa towns around us. We talked about how no one walks beans any more, walking the rows of soy beans to pull button weeds and cockle-burrs by hand and chop rogue corn with hoe. We talked about how farming has gone to spraying weed-killing chemicals and factory-farming pigs instead. It is a simple lesson in how ways of life come to an end and are not necessarily replaced with something better.
There is an artist working on a patriotic project to put one of these in every county in Iowa.
We constantly remake ourselves as the world changes and ages around us. Nothing lasts forever. Life is a process of growing and withering and regrowing. A simple word for that is “farming”. Who we were impacts who we have become and will affect what comes after. But we learn simple lessons from going to the places we love best and doing our dead-level best to get from there to here and move eventually to someplace beyond. And Dows, Iowa is just one of those places… I guess.
The Clock on the Wall
Who in their right mind writes an essay about a clock on the wall? Well, the “right mind” thing gives me an out. I do watch the clock on the wall. Especially now that I am old, and the sand in the hour glass is running out. The clock on the wall can be quite entertaining. Especially one like the cuckoo clock that hangs in my parents’ front entryway. On the hour, the dancers twirl and the two goofballs in lederhosen saw away at the log they will never be able to cut in two.
My wife and I gave that clock to my parents as a gift for their 50th wedding anniversary. We bought it in Texas and brought it on a visit back to the family farm in Iowa. Having old German relatives as a boy, I remember waiting impatiently for the clock to strike in Great Aunt Selma’s house, anxious to see the cuckoo pop out and the clockwork entertainment do its little mechanical show. I’d have gladly wished on a star for the hours to pass instantly… to see the show again right away… and be older and wiser and able to do more. Back then it seemed like older folks like Aunt Selma lived forever, with her dried-apple face and German accent. Accumulated time seemed to have majesty and power. It was magical.
But now I am old. My joints hurt every time I move. I can’t get out of bed of a morning easily. Parts of me that I used to take for granted no longer work. I have forgotten what it feels like to feel good and full of energy. The time on the face of this old clock hasn’t changed in nearly a decade. My parents don’t keep it wound. We no longer look forward to the clock-Kinder dancing so often. If the clock stays forever at five after four, maybe the grim reaper won’t come knock at the door.
I have always believed that there was magic in old cuckoo clocks. It was a simple, earnest faith in magic that only a child can truly know. But now, as an old man, I remember.
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Filed under art my Grandpa loved, autobiography, commentary, family, feeling sorry for myself, humor, metaphor, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as clock magic, German cuckoo clocks, humor, magic, memory, metaphors for life, time passing