Plains Truth Journal

This week they tore down the old dilapidated, abandoned house at the corner of our block. It’s ironic that for the past 20 years, as we have labored to restore our old house to its former glory, we have watched that house fall further and forever into disrepair to the point where it was no longer habitable.

That fate might have met our house as well as at one point in its lifetime it was abandoned. When we bought it 20 years ago it had been owned by three people in rapid succession who tried to bring it back to life but were never quite able to do so. We were the only ones with the necessary resources, and fool hardy enough, to make a major dent in the labor intensive task of bringing this grand lady back to her former glory but it has been an expensive and labor-intensive labor of love.

We didn’t know much about the house when we bought it except that it needed some work (little did we know how much work would be involved) and it had space in the backyard for a vegetable garden. A few years into our renovations, we were working on the front porch when Steve Hanschu dropped by to comment on our progress. He asked if we wanted to be on the 2002 Christmas homes tour sponsored by the Lyon County Historical Society celebrating its 65th Anniversary. They were looking for homes that were owned by influential people in 1937, when the the society was formed by community leaders wanting to preserve the history and heritage of the county.

That’s when we found out that our house was built in 1904 by Milton R. Reiber, a grocery salesman. In 1927, he sold the house to Francis Arnold, president of the Commercial National Bank from 1934 to 1943 when Mr. Arnold bought out his father’s holding in a livestock ranch in Ashland and left Emporia. After the Arnolds, the house had various owners and eventually some of the best features of the house disappeared. The gas light fixtures were removed as was the floor to ceiling fireplace mantel.

During the sixties when high ceilings were thought to be energy inefficient the first floor ceilings were lowered by at least two feet. Much of the original woodwork was replaced and the walls were covered over in paneling.

It took a long time and a lot of searching to find the pieces that would restore the authentic features of the house. I once flew back from Maine with a suitcase full of old doorknobs as most of the original ones had been lost. In Kansas City, we found old egg and dart moulding to replace what was missing on the second floor windows and doors. Fortunately, we found Ben Gray, who loves old houses as much as we do. He was able to replicate most of the features of this house that had been removed. Most people walking into this house for the first time cannot tell the difference between the original and replacement features of this house. But for any that are interested, we keep a photo album of the before and after to illustrate how far this old house has come.

While we managed to salvage this house, there are many houses that have lost their battle to remain viable during the twenty years we have lived here in Emporia. It’s unfortunate that as a society, we see little value in things, or people for that matter, once they have outlived their apparent usefulness. We tear down our houses and put up something new that will not have the staying power of these old soundly built houses. The foundation of our house is 18 inches thick. After 115 years, there still is almost no settling and the old lathe and plaster walls have almost no cracks. Do you know how valuable that is in Emporia where with each spring downpour, most of the basements end up flooding?.

A few months ago, I was reading a review on Yelp for Radius Brewery. The reviewer stated that Radius was a good restaurant, but Emporia was a dumpy, trashy town. I took umbrage at first, because in our neighborhood I see promising signs that people are beginning to care for these old houses, but when I drove down Merchant street from I-35, I began to see what the writer was talking about. There are still too many dilapidated structures, most of which are rental properties.

It’s no wonder our kids don’t stay in town once they receive their degree. The care we have for our neighborhoods says something about the care we have for each other. It says that once they have lost their shiny freshness and outlived their apparent usefulness, they are no longer worthy of care. What future does that promise our youth?

Well, no more grousing about the weather. Spring has finally arrived and we have nothing to complain about. It seems to me that this is one of the latest springs we have ever experienced. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I wonder if it has something to do with Easter which is extremely late this year. Who decides when Easter will be after all? I have always thought that it had something to do with Passover, but who makes the final call. Is it like Groundhog’s day when observers wait for Punxsutawney Phil to come out of his winter home? He didn’t do a very good job this year, so perhaps the Easter date declarers were off as well.

It really doesn’t matter. A season of rebirth and resurrection from the grave of what has been a horrible winter is upon us. The birds are singing a totally different song than they were two weeks ago. The annual burning of the hills is wrecking havoc with all of our sinuses while at the same time we have our windows open at last. The winter of our discontent is over.

It was a horrible winter for us, filled with dread and indecision. We have been wanting to move to Kansas City for some time, but it seemed impossible. There were so many obstacles in our way, the biggest of which is our ties to this community. We have been here twenty years, almost a lifetime to someone in their twenties who is starting out, and a length of time that we never imagined when we first moved here. It’s the longest either of us has lived anywhere in our lives. I counted up a few weeks ago and I have moved twenty-two times in my life. That’s a lot of packing up and saying goodbye and now we are planning to do it all over again.

The good thing about moving often is that you learn to travel light. You don’t collect a lot of possessions you know you are going to have to pack up and haul someday. The same could be said of relationships. When you move frequently, friendships are taken lightly. You can enjoy your friends but not get too attached so that the leaving is easy.

Moving around from place to place in the city like I did when I was young is different from moving across the country. Our move from Kansas City to New Jersey was the first time I had to say goodbye to friends with some finality although our family was still there so we knew we would be back sometime. It was different thing when we moved from New Jersey to Memphis nine years later. I still have a picture of the two of us, surrounded by our friends saying goodbye . My face was red from crying and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is still a lot to be done before we leave Emporia. We have to sell our house. It’s a big, old monstrosity that we have poured our hearts and elbow grease, not to mention our fortune, into for the past twenty years. It’s filled with wonderful memories, especially of all of the international students who have shared their lives with us over the past few years. But they have all moved on. They are scattered from San Francisco to Nashville to Cincinnati to Bogota, Colombia, to Seoul, South Korea, but the memories are still here. They will not be left behind when we leave this house.

There are all of the friends and neighbors we have made through the years. The ones we made through the Emporia Chorale, bridge at the Senior Center, from doing income taxes for AARP, from being a CASA, the people at Auspision and Hetlinger who have taken such good care of my brother, from just walking around town and especially from our church here. They have filled up the days of our lives while we are here and it will never be the same. We won’t be able to encounter someone we know every time we go to Walmart in Kansas City. It just will not be the same.

We also have all of the memories of the AirBnB guests we have hosted through the years: the great DK200 riders we have met and the Glass Blown golfers who have partied here in their spare time.

We leave it all behind, but not the memories. Those we will be taking with us. We still have a few months while we make all of the pieces fall into place. I will probably be writing more about our moving as we progress toward the final day. But for now, we will be enjoying the promise of spring and new beginnings.

It’s finally spring. After what seemed like a never-ending winter, it has finally arrived. The birds are singing. The Habitat for Humanity concert took place on Sunday. All is as it should be.

The Habitat concert, a combined effort by the ESU Acapella choir, the Emporia Chorale (formerly known as the Community Chorus) and the Emporia High School choir to raise funds for Habitat, has been a harbinger of spring for years. Music does lighten the mind and gives us energy. Perhaps that is why I associate it with the beginning of spring rather than any other season. It’s hard to think of any music that makes one long for winter unless perhaps it is a Wagner opera. For the most part, music is uplifting.

Studies have shown that music has a great effect on the human mind, and some might argue on the whole of nature, i.e., music soothes the savage beast.

Exposure to music, just like exposure to another language at an early age benefits a child into their adult years. There have been many studies about the correlation between music and development, but I base most of my opinions on observations over the years.

One of the things that early music helps children with is math. I was discussing this with a friend recently. My brothers and I all studied some form of music and excelled in math. My friend said that all of her siblings were good in math except for her. They all studied piano, but she had a different piano teacher who was not as disciplined as the one who taught her older brothers and sisters. They were all talented musicians and good in math, but she was neither.

Look around at the people who find themselves making music during their spare time. Often, they are accountants, computer programmers, or doctors. In many cases, it was not the family that they were born into that made them successful, it was the advent of music in their lives.

Studies have also shown that exposure to music at an early age improves verbal skills. Quoting from an article published in the Public Library of Science in 2008, Children who received at least three years of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills).

The problem is there is music and there is what some have construed as music but it is not. Music is not just rhythm, there is a mathematical structure to the notes that forces the brain to think more clearly. Classical music specifically has a beneficial effect on the mind. A study in France found that students listening to a lecture while classical music played in the background, scored significantly higher on a quiz about the lecture compared to those who heard the lecture with nothing in the background. Researchers speculated that the music put the students minds in a more receptive state to absorb what they were hearing.

Another study of radiologists at the University of Maryland Harbor Hospital found that listening to Baroque music in the reading room resulted in improvements in both their mood and their diagnostic abilities.

It’s just my opinion, but I don’t think you would find the same results from rap, hip hop, or hard rock. From my perspective, that music is just too jarring. Many have complained over the years about the lyrics being violent and suggestive, but I don’t think it is the lyrics alone that are provoking. The music throbs, and gets the blood pumping. That might be good for an 80 year old who needs to be propelled out the door, but is is unnecessary for teenagers, especially those in the poorer communities who already have their awareness heightened by their surroundings. Those teenagers might benefit more from classical music that increases their reasoning ability and prepares them for a future.

It was disheartening to observe on Sunday how the size of the Emporia High School choir has diminished over the years. Friends have speculated that it is because of the change from two semesters to a trimester system instituted a couple of years ago which limits a students’ ability to participate in music because of the limited opportunity to take elective courses. I’m not sure that music should be an elective. Education , in general, has failed to recognize the importance of music, and I might add all of the arts, in the development of healthy intellect. They are doing a disservice to those they are supposed to be educating and limiting the ability of those students to excel.

If the robins think that music is the way to herald spring, perhaps we should recognize its importance in our lives as well.

I take back everything I wrote a few weeks ago about how beautiful the winter was this year. I spoke too soon. Obviously, I believed Puxatawny Phil’s prognostication that winter was over and from past experience, we know that he lies a lot.

It’s easy to look at the interpretation of a groundhog’s behavior, used for years as a predictor of spring, and acknowledge that it is an amusing but seldom exact representation of the truth. Unfortunately, most of us are not so adept at recognizing the difference between opinion and fact in the media these days.

I have been writing for the Gazette for several years. I have never thought that what I am writing is anything but opinion. This is the opinion page, after all, not page one. Some of my opinions are based on fact, and whenever I state a fact, I research it to the best of my ability, although I admit that I rely on Google for my research sometimes and that requires fact checking the sources as well.

Social media is a great example of a platform where facts fall by the wayside and gossip, opinion, innuendo and even humor are forwarded as truth. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a story from “The Babylon Bee” forwarded on Facebook as truth. We have a very gullible society where doctored videos and falsehoods are accepted if they conform to our preconceived ideas.

Few people realize what a threat gullibility is to our freedom. Being able to differentiate between opinion and fact is one of the reasons why education is so important, but I fear (and this is just my opinion) that much of education today is indoctrination rather than teaching. We are creating a younger generation that cannot think for themselves but is ready to fight for ideas based on heresay and false accusations. The Jussie Smollett situation was a sad illustration of how fast people are to jump to conclusions before examining the facts. People used to have a ‘gut feel’ that something was not right, but we lose those abilities when our education system teaches what to think rather than exposing students to factual truth and letting them decide for themselves.

It isn’t just in the classroom that we are losing the ability to separate fact from fiction. Journalism is suffering the same fate for more than one reason. The so called news channels have become opinion pages with the occasional news headline thrown in. I remember first watching CNN when they covered the various foreign wars and you saw the reporters in flack helmets, waiting for the next barrage to explode in front of them. That was not an opinion.

Now, members of the news media have become celebrities, abdicating their journalistic responsibilities for ratings. Those same reporters sit at a desk and tell us what they want us to believe as factual when it is merely their opinion. They are directing our minds and wills towards the response and outcome that they want.

That is why local news and journalism is so important. Local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate, but local news is much more likely to be based on fact rather than opinion. It’s hard to accuse someone of something that is mere conjecture when you may run into them or their mother in the grocery store. The local news gives us what we need to know. What the city commission is voting on, what streets are going to be shut down for repairs, the newest store opening, who just had a new baby, who is moving on to another position, and who has died. None of this is conjecture. It’s fact.

We all have opinions and local newspapers make it possible for us to share those opinions with our fellow citizens. The Gazette is blessed to have a lot of citizens who are not afraid and are willing to take the time to write down their thoughts and opinions to share with the citizenry of this fair city. I think most of the Gazette’s readers recognize that one of the beauties of this country is that we don’t all think alike or express ourselves in the same way. That’s what separates us from the more oppressive societies like communism. Journalism may not always be objective, but as long as we have page four of the Gazette, the public will have the ability to challenge opinion that has been stated as fact.

Speaking of facts, we began daylight savings this week and it has messed my timing up once more. I could say that spring has finally arrived, but that is just my opinion.

What Is it in our human nature that makes us susceptible to shortcuts?  You know what I mean; you look at a ladder leaning against the roof and you think “it’s a little crooked, but it should hold me “, just before you come crashing down to the ground.  Or you pick up a paring knife while holding an apple in your hand instead of taking the time to find the cutting board thinking “oh this knife is not very sharp “, and the next thing you know you find yourself making a trip to the emergency room for stitches. 

We’ve all been there!  It makes for great laughs on America’s Funniest Videos, but sometimes the results are more than amusing.

I think men are notorious for taking shortcuts.  It’s may be something in their DNA.  It’s the thing that makes them think that driving a car around an asphalt track at 200 miles an hour is a good thing.  It is also the thing that makes them drop everything to run into a burning house to rescue the inhabitants. 

Women don’t do that…at least not most women.  We consider all the consequence and decide it’s not a good thing.  I don’t know how many times I have watched my husband doing something and thought that perhaps he had not considered the obvious first step.  But true to form, he takes the easy way out and I’m left to pick him up off the ground or sweep up the broken glass.   The only place where women tend to take shortcuts is with the cell phone.  They only take a second to look at a text and find themselves sliding off the road.

The most recent example of a failed shortcut is the case of Jussie Smollett.  He wanted a raise.  There were probably several ways to achieve that end, but he chose to fake a racist homophonic attack for the attention.  How well did that work?  He has been disgraced, his part was chopped from the show Empire, his career is in tatters and he is facing the possibility of being convicted of a crime.  All because he may have thought that fabricating a story would be easier than doing the hard work required for recognition and more compensation.

The sad thing is that the press took the same short cut. Instead of waiting until all the evidence came out, they started their witch-hunt.  The perpetrators were wearing MAGA hats, therefore, it had to be those ‘evil’ Trump supporters.  They are the only ones devious enough to stage an attack like that. 

In truth, the only ones who would stage an attack like that are the actors we find ourselves being surrounded by these days.  What did Shakespeare say, in his pastoral comedy, ‘As You Like It’?

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,

Unfortunately, many of us play too many parts without thinking of the consequences.  We mouth pronouncements as if they are truth, expecting everyone to believe us when we haven’t taken the time to really dig for the truth or even get to know ourselves.  As a writer, I am painfully aware of the shortcuts that I could take if I were not careful.  There are many famous writers, and I might add politicians, who have been guilty of plagiarizing the works or words of others. 

What are all the forwarded inaccurate posts on Facebook but shortcuts?  We don’t have the time or brainpower to create our own thoughts, so we send on someone else’s version and consider that we have made our point.  We haven’t.  All we have done is highlight our ignorance. I sometimes laugh at the posts I see that people have forwarded as fact when all I must do is Google the person or event in question to see that it is not true.

We live in a very fast world, information and everything else spins around us at an alarming rate.  It seems to me that these times call for more caution rather than recklessness.  Perhaps the only way to survive in these perilous times is to slow down and let the world speed by.   By being deliberate we may avoid the shortcuts and pitfalls that seem to plague society today.

Every morning we sit in the library to have coffee, With every upcoming holiday, I create a message out of old wooden alphabet blocks, on the sill of the leaded glass window above my husband’s favorite chair, wishing us “Happy Fourth of July” or “Merry Christmas”. For the past two weeks, the message has been “Happy Valentines Day.” So, it was funny, when I told my husband that I didn’t know what to write about this week, that he said, “Why don’t you write about Valentines Day?” I had been staring right at the message without seeing it.

Valentines day used to be a big deal to me, beginning with when I was in grade school. I doubt that the tradition we followed then has made it to the 21st century. It would be too anxiety producing now, but when I was in grade school, Valentines Day was a big deal. We would make valentines out of red paper and white doilies with messages of love for our family members: mother, father or brothers and sisters. Everyone decorated a shoe box with a hole cut in the top large enough for a card. The box would be placed on top of your desk and people would slip penny valentines into the slot.

It wasn’t just a matter of looking at the cards that one received. A lot of thought, at least on my part, went into choosing the perfect valentine for my classmates. A package of thirty to forty valentines cost less than a dollar at the Dime Store. I would carefully read every card deciding which one was appropriate for each of my classmates. I wanted to make sure the sentiment reflected my thoughts concerning each of them.

Other kids may not have felt that the day was as important, but I experienced its importance every Valentines day at my house. Like most of the other families in my neighborhood, during those years after the war, we did not have a lot of resources. New shoes were a once a year event, coinciding with the beginning of the school year. My uncle would arrive with the hand-me-downs from my cousin at least once a year. Christmas resulted in one or two presents at most. On birthdays my mother would bake a cake. That was the extent of our celebrations.

But, Valentines day was special. Without fail, my father, who had not married until he was 38 years old, would stop by on his way home from work, to buy a box of Valentine chocolates for my mother. Every year, he would turn back into the love struck suitor who fell in love with his best friend’s youngest sister. He was fourteen when she was born, but I don’t think he was waiting for her to grow up during all the years he roamed throughout the country grooming prized Herefords for cattle shows. They reconnected twenty some years later and he gave up the wandering life.

I can still see him, appearing at the front door, with his hands behind his back, holding a red cellophane wrapped box of chocolates. He would slyly approach my mother, giving her a peck on the cheek and his heart tied up in red. Mother, in turn, would always giggle and say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” but we all knew how special it made her feel.

The boxes would remain, long after the candy was gone, used to save old letters, newspaper clippings, photos, anything of importance. They would eventually wear out to be replaced by a newer box, because as children, we loved to dig through the contents as if we could view our parents internal lives based on what they chose to save.

The old Valentine heart boxes are gone as are most of the momentoes of those days. Recently, while trying to pare down my own life’s accumulation, I came upon a valentine made by my brother, Tim, who has been gone for thirty years, as well as one of the letters my father wrote to my mother during his traveling/courting days. Generations have come and gone, but I still feel the love of my long departed family when I think of those ‘Valentine Days’.

Perhaps that’s why we need this holiday. We need to stop worrying about the love that is missing in this world and reflect on the love that we have experienced and are experiencing even now. That my husband had to remind me of the day is somewhat sad, but predictable. I guess that is what Valentines day has always been; a day for husbands, fathers, and sons to remind the women in their lives that they are still loved. I’m grateful for that even if the heart shaped boxes of chocolates have long ago passed out of fashion.

The government is open. I suppose that’s a good thing but I don’t think it brings us any closer to solving what’s wrong with our country. I also don’t think that any one person declaring that they are going to be running for president is going to solve any of the problems we are facing. Our problems are much deeper, the chasm much wider than what any one person can bridge.

Everyone has their opinion about what’s wrong with our country, but the majority of those opinions are based upon their own self interest. Everyone feels that their view of the world, their wants, their needs are the most important. We have no empathy for our fellow man, only contempt. We don’t know how to listen, only comment and if that doesn’t work we scream obscenities until we get our way. We are all wealthy spoiled brats. Even the poor among us are spoiled brats, crying that they don’t have enough when their standard of living is greater than the majority of those in the world. Drive through one of the poorer neighborhoods in any city and you will see yards filled with the abandoned toys of both children and adults.

How did we get to this point? How did a nation founded with the idea of liberty and justice for all devolve into a society where it’s every man for himself. I think a lot of it has to do with our prosperity, our financial success. That was not always the promise offered by our shores. Once the promise was to the ‘huddled masses” yearning to be free. Now the majority of those wanting to come here are looking for financial success. Most of the immigrants pushing at the borders of our country would tell you they are looking for a better job. They are looking to get rich like everyone else in the United States. The American Dream as it is currently being exported is one where anyone and everyone can become a Kardashian with excess appetite and no social conscience. Few realize that in pursuing the dream as it stands now everyone must stop caring for anyone but themselves. They will be asked to give up their conscience and their morals in order to achieve the current version of the American dream.

Even those seeking to escape the violence in their countries and build a better life for their families will find that our murder rate is as high or higher than that in the less affluent countries they are fleeing. Here they will encounter a crime rate fueled by greed and envy, where a life is not worth a t-shirt or a pair of shoes. They may find financial success, they may share in our wealth but it’s s bargain with the devil. We have every thing we want at the cost of our soul.

In short we’re drowning in everything our money can buy. We ‘re become pathetic, obese, hoarders. There are those who realizing the predicament that most American’s find themselves in have become wealthy selling us books on how to lose weight or tidy up by getting rid of possessions. Thousands are trying to Kondo-ize their lives based on the de-cluttering principles of Marie Kondo. Thrift stores are overflowing with the refuse of our excess. Getting rid of unwanted pounds and possessions might be a good start, but we need to acknowledge that we have placed entirely too much emphasis on the pursuits of wealth and happiness at the expense of life and liberty.

And what about that liberty that our forefathers were seeking; the freedom to believe as they chose without government oppression. We are rapidly losing that final, most important freedom: the ability to live our lives without the government dictating our thoughts or becoming our moral compass.

None of our problems can be solved by a border wall, a different president or healthcare for all. We need a change at the gut and heart level. We need to stop being manipulated by those whose primary motive is financial, from social media or the press to the weather forecasters who keep us repeatedly on edge with their dire predictions. We need to tune out all of the strident and hysterical voices and focus on the world around us, those that we love, those that we don’t.

Instead of worrying about whether or not the government is open, we need to worry about whether or not we are open. We need to be open to others and open to all of the opportunities we have been afforded to live productive, fulfilled lives based solely on the freedoms promised by our forefathers.