Raise the Statues, Tear Them Down

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Andrew Jackson, Harriet Tubman, history, Neil Postman, Quincy, statues, Unitarian Church, Young Woman of Amajac

This post is adapted from a talk I recently gave to the Quincy, Illinois, Unitarian Church.

Recently, the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County, along with the Tri-States Civil War Roundtable, dedicated a marker in Woodland Cemetery at the grave of Edward Prince, a Quincyan who distinguished himself through service in the Civil War. Colonel Prince, who had been an attorney before the war, was the second-in-command of a daring cavalry raid in 1863 that diverted Confederate forces away from the defense of Vicksburg, allowing Ulysses S. Grant to move troops into position to take the city, a major turning point in the war.

It is right and proper to honor Colonel Prince’s leadership and valor. At the same time, I find myself wondering: What if Edward Prince’s father, instead of moving his family to Illinois in the 1830s to take up farming, had moved to Mississippi? Unfortunately, one scenario I can easily imagine is that Edward Prince would have distinguished himself in the service of the Confederate Army, and that his service would have been recognized, memorialized, and honored, and that today a controversy would be brewing over whether his statue should be taken down somewhere, or his name removed from a public building, or some other form of reconsideration of the meaning of his acts.

We all have our private forms of reverence. People we respect, honor, and seek to emulate. But reverence also has a public face, in which our society tries to single out people who demonstrate particular virtues, values, or actions, and that’s where things can get tricky.

For much of history, the idea of publicly sanctioned honor, and especially state-sanctioned honor, was tied up with power. And for much of the world, it still is. The emperor’s profile on coins, the triumphal arch in the public square, the dictator’s portrait in every schoolroom. These things show who’s in charge and whose will is to be obeyed. For the rest of us, our job is to admire from our lowly place, not aspire to their exalted status. But in modern times, we have adopted a more expansive idea of public admiration, one that does include an element of aspiration. We are called not only to admire these acclaimed people, but to be like them.  

The complication comes in the fact that people’s idea of what is admirable changes over time. Take Andrew Jackson, for example, first placed on the modern twenty-dollar bill in 1928, although his image has been on American currency, and thus a pre-eminent symbol of what it means to be an American, since the 1860s. What was it that led to his placement on such a widely used banknote? I’d have to say that for earlier generations, Jackson represented what many Americans liked to celebrate and found worthy of recognition: aggressiveness, domination, military prowess, distrust of elites and intellectuals, and boundless ambition. A lot of Americans today still think of those as admirable traits. So it’s no surprise that our former president placed a bust of Jackson prominently in the White House and frequently posed for pictures in front of it.

As for myself, I prefer the person who is being planned to replace Jackson, Harriet Tubman, as my virtue model. She was tough but focused, committed to human liberation in ways both large and small, and unafraid to risk her personal safety in the service of others. And she cared for her aging parents in their later years.

So our ideas of public honor change over time, and one generation’s heroes become the next generation’s problems. Will something similar happen in future years? You can count on it. So perhaps we need to think about how we as a society dole out praise. Maybe we don’t need a statue in the traffic circle to tell us how to act.   

It’s a commonplace among pollsters that when people name the person they most admire, they most frequently identify their mother or father. Favorite teachers come in pretty high on that list, too, along with more distant relatives like grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I’m not suggesting that we start putting up statues to our parents in the backyard, or even the household shrines that are commonplace in some countries. But I am wondering if our definition of heroism needs to be reconsidered, and whether it’s not as inaccessible as it might seem.

What is the phrase that heroes so often use when given praise for their accomplishments? “I was just doing my job.” I think we tend to attribute that comment to modesty, or maybe even false modesty, the idea that if someone says, “Yeah, I did great,” they’re crossing a line of appropriateness. But let’s take the hero at her word for a minute. Let’s say that’s the true and simple feeling. “I was just doing my job.” What does that say to us?

I think it tells us that if we’re looking for greatness, we don’t have to look too far. I’ll spare you any corny stories about everyday heroes because that’s not exactly what I’m talking about, but rather the simple observation that an action that may feel ordinary, even mundane, to the doer may have an impact far beyond its visible effects, or even its intended ones.

I am something of a worrywart in daily life, the kind of person who likes to plan and plan, and think of all the things that might go wrong, and as a result I sometimes rob myself of spontaneous enjoyment. I remember a friend of mine telling me once that on his kids’ birthdays, they would celebrate with a “Whatever Happens” day, deliberately unplanned, following the birthday child’s wishes as they unfolded and sometimes ending up with large blocks of empty time, whiling away a few hours engaged in what even a charitable observer might describe as goofing off. My initial thought about this was that it was kind of cheating, to make a tradition out of not planning anything, and part of me still thinks that. But looking at it from the other direction, I think about the birthday child’s perspective and what it feels like to know that your parent is clearing the day and letting you decide what to do. And if you want to spend the afternoon at the arcade, or go out for indulgent pancakes for breakfast, or just stay in bed until you feel like getting up, that’s what will happen. The implicit message of “Whatever Happens” day is: You matter. I will listen to you. Your wishes count.

And this is where I turn back to reverence, how we show it and how we perceive it in our daily lives. An ordinary encounter can be reverential. When we approach a conversation thinking equally of the other person’s perspective and needs, as well as our own, we are recognizing that individual’s fellow humanity.

But there are many obstacles to that kind of interaction, as we all know. For one thing, and let’s face it, people tend to be pretty selfish much of the time, focused on their own desires and needs and not those of others. I expect you’ve had the experience, as I have many times, of being in a conversation with someone and realizing that they were not paying any genuine attention to what you were saying, but instead thinking ahead to the next thing they were going to say. It’s not a pleasant feeling to recognize that you’re basically serving as a placeholder for someone else’s monologue.

And to complicate matters further, we are surrounded by a great deal of noise these days. How many times, when you ask someone how they’re doing, you receive the stock response, “Busy.” Now there are different kinds of busy. There’s the busy of someone who is trying to make ends meet, and that’s a busy we can all respect. There’s the busy of someone in search of wealth or status, something we’ve all engaged in, although we sense instinctively that this kind of busy has to be monitored so it doesn’t throw one’s life out of balance. And then there’s the busy of someone who is using busy-ness to avoid any empty moments, as if there’s something disreputable about sitting on the deck to watch the sunset, or standing out in the yard getting to know your neighbor, or catching up with an old friend through a note, an e-mail, or even a posting on our current villain, Facebook. Sometimes busy-ness serves as a protective screen, keeping us at arm’s length from the rewarding, but emotionally taxing, labor of more genuine interaction.

And of course the social media themselves are often part of the noise. For every rediscovered friend and engaging conversation, there are a thousand predigested memes, stock comments, and smart remarks that are momentarily funny but ultimately corrosive. I find myself posting less and less on social media these days, not because I don’t recognize their potential as a medium for true engagement, but because they have failed to live up to that potential again and again. In 1985, long before the arrival of the Internet era, Neil Postman wrote his famous critique of the American mass media, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I’m sorry to report that the trends he identified in that book have not slowed or reversed, but accelerated, so that today we find ourselves in a state of near-terminal amusement, drowning in hashtag blessings.

I realize that I may appear to have wandered from my original topic by now, so I’d like to try to bring things together and show the connections. My point is that we are presently caught up in a great debate, here in the United States and elsewhere, about what sort of public honor should be given to people, and what kind of people should receive it, and I don’t want to downplay the importance of that debate. Earlier this week, for example, the city of Mexico City announced that it was replacing the statue of Christopher Columbus that formerly stood along one of the city’s main thoroughfares with a different statue, a replica of a pre-Hispanic sculpture depicting an indigenous woman, known as the Young Woman of Amajac. This is a powerful shift in emphasis, from the conqueror to the conquered, and we should not minimize its significance.

But in our daily lives, we are not likely to have the opportunity to behave heroically, to lead troops into battle, free enslaved people, or anything else that might put us in a portrait gallery. But what we can do is what I’ve suggested here: we can engage with our fellow humans in an authentic and reverential fashion.

I was thinking about the Golden Rule a few days ago. It occurred to me that most of the time, we think of the Golden Rule in instrumental terms. Why do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Because it’s good business in the long run. If I honor my agreements, and keep my word, and that encourages you to do the same, we both come out winners. Kind of like the rules of the road. Drive on the right and you won’t wreck. But there’s another level at which the Golden Rule speaks to us. In treating others as we would like to be treated, we are recognizing our common humanity, the bond that joins us all regardless of race, gender, age, or any of the other accidents of circumstance.

When we treat someone with courtesy, listen to them without prejudice, and act with compassion and kindness, we are just doing our job. Our job as human beings. And not that it matters, but it’s possible that someone will be building a little statue of us in their heart as a result.

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Living with Loss

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art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

Originality and conventionality

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Conventionality, Emerson, Originality, Quincy, Unitarian

A short excerpt from a talk I gave to the Quincy Unitarian Church, yesterday:

I think of Emerson’s famous comment about individuality: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” The adjective that often gets overlooked there is the “foolish” before the “consistency.” It’s not consistency itself that is the problem, it’s foolish consistency, following the dictates of convention without knowing why or having good reason. It’s fine to scorn the herd, but sometimes the herd is heading for the waterhole. Conventional wisdom is sometimes conventional because it’s wise.

It seems like the older I get, the more the idea of the wisdom of the elders makes sense to me. What the elders have to offer is accumulated practical experience, the knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. The word “orthodox” originally meant “correct thinking.” Rejecting the conventional sometimes means rejecting common sense, substituting what you would like to be true for what is true. My “unorthodox ideas” may just be whims. Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance,” “I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” but I would not recommend using whim to build your porch.

The entire talk will be up on their website before long.

The Wounds of War

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Civil War, Quincy, Sam Hildebrand, Second World War, Unitarian Church, USS Seawolf

Excerpted from my talk to the Quincy, IL, Unitarian Church on December 7.

Today is December 7. And for Americans of a certain age, that will always be followed by “a date that will live in infamy.” It’s the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the event that drew the United States into the Second World War. For my parents’ generation, December 7 was the day that changed everything, that shook the world loose from its foundations. Even though war had been raging in Europe for two years and in Asia for two years before that, it’s the attack on Pearl Harbor that dominates our national psyche as the day the war began.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about war lately as I’ve been working on my second novel. Not so much war itself but the aftermath of war, the societal and cultural reverberations of war that echo long after the war ends.

Evidence of the wounds of war is everywhere we look, if we look carefully enough. On the personal level, our friends, relatives, neighbors, fellow church members, and co-workers who have experienced war deal with that experience in their own ways and with their own levels of intensity. In our political life, we deal with the costs of war, both the economic costs that come from a commitment to military spending, honoring promises made to veterans, and maintaining international ties that grew from wartime; and also in the guns-or-butter sense that every decision to enter into conflict or to maintain a certain level of war readiness is also a decision not to spend money on something else, the old one aircraft carrier equals a million school lunches calculation we’re all familiar with from Facebook.

But as a novelist you try not to think in such abstract terms, and try to focus instead on the human side. So I have a few stories to tell you of a semi-personal nature. Some of them may seem beside the point of this talk, so please bear with me.

When the United States entered the war, my mother started a scrapbook. She was 18 years old at the time, a year and a half out of high school, so as you can imagine the coming of the war affected her and her friends greatly. The community she and my father grew up in was called German because of the high number of German immigrants who had settled there in the 1800s, so maybe they overcompensated a bit. But whatever the reason, the German township always overtopped its war bond quota, led the scrap metal drive, and of course sent its boys into the service by the dozen.

Reading her letters and clippings today always gives me a feeling of being transported to an entirely different universe, even though this is my own immediate family I’m talking about. Letters home were subject to military censorship, so there is little mention of movement or fighting. Like good farm boys, they always took note of the weather and the countryside, and the principal phrases of approval or disapproval were “a lot like home” and “not like home.” One theme permeates all those letters and V-mails, and it’s the simple desire to get home.

The same thoughts appear in wartime correspondence from all ages. While working on my books I spent a lot of time with “Missouri’s War,” a compilation of original source documents that details life in Civil War Missouri through letters, newspaper accounts, sermons, speeches, and so forth. And while the letters in the initial rush to war sometimes have a measure of enthusiasm to them, once the war is underway the voices change, and a kind of grim get-me-through-this mentality emerges.

In 1864 a Missouri cavalryman on the Union side named William Kesterson wrote home to his brother in Lafayette County, close to Kansas City. Kesterson had been in the military hospital in Springfield for about nine months at the time of this letter, and was to stay in that hospital a few months more before being discharged. So you can imagine his state of mind. Part of the letter reads:

Dear Brother

I take pen in hand to inform you that yore letter of the 12th came to hand this day and I was glad to hear that yore health was some better than when you had wrote before. . . . I have wrote to my wife to stay where she is a while longer if she can stay there in any peace it is better than to move to town. That is the worst place a family can go to. . . . I aught to be well satisfied here but it seems as if I cant and I wish that I was away and then I get so that I don’t care where I am until my time is out then I want to get somewhere where I can live in peace with my wife and children and where I can give them good schooling that will be my main object when I get out of the service is the schooling of them. My wife says they are as fat as pigs and talk about me all the time you can guess whether I want to see them or not. . . . I shall be glad to see the end of our time for serving uncle Sam come to an end. I hope the end of this war is close at hand but I fear it will be a long time yet and if you don’t wach you will loose yore bet on peace being made by the first of May. I hope that I shall see you again but when that will ever be the lord only knows but I hope that through gods mercy it wont be long. Yet life is very uncertain and then the dread of the future hangs heavily on my mind some times and dashes what little worldly pleasure I see away from me.

Mr. Kesterson, you will be happy to know, did indeed return to his family, and lived on in Lafayette County for another twenty years.

One of the most treasured documents in my family is the recollections of my great-grandfather, Christopher Wiegenstein, who immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1848, found his way to Madison County, Missouri, and established a farm there. His memoir was composed later in his life, at the entreating of his children, who wanted him to get down on paper the events of his early years in the United States. Like most German immigrants to Missouri in that time, he was a devoted Unionist, an anti-slavery man, and a supporter of the North during the Civil War.

He recalls one harrowing incident in which his brother-in-law, a man named George Canisius, was shot down in cold blood by a bushwhacker. Our family’s oral history was that George was killed because, as a recent immigrant, he didn’t speak English well enough to explain himself to the marauders. The bushwhacker’s story, recorded in a memoir written after the war, was that George had informed on him to the authorities and was killed in retaliation. Either story is plausible and both may have elements of truth.

What I had never noticed, reading this account in earlier times, was a comment that Great-Grandpa Chris made at the end of his memoir. Retired, comfortable, having spent a few terms as a justice of the peace and county judge, he writes, “In politics I am Democrat.” Just this year, I read that and thought, “Wait a minute. Why would an immigrant German, a supporter of the Union, a man who had lost a close relation to a guerrilla, why would that man be a Democrat? When in the last half of the Nineteenth Century, the Democratic Party in Missouri was to a considerable extent the party of ex-Confederates?”

The short answer is that I don’t know. But what I think happened is that Missouri had been a Democratic state before the war, in the frontier expansion Andrew Jackson sort of mode, and once the war was over there was such a longing to return to the way things had been that people were willing to join with their former enemies, victors and vanquished, in the efforts at rebuilding the state. Some of them did it for political advantage. Some of them did it because they felt more sympathetic to the Southern cause than they had been able to show during the war. But for whatever reason, by the early 1870s most Missourians had found a way to put the war into the past and move ahead.

But some did not. In Missouri, disaffected former rebels, men like Jesse James, made war by other means, attacking the visible symbols of the powers that had defeated them – banks, railroads, and government officials. Farther south, where the disruption to the social order caused by the end of slavery was greater, the defeated regained the reins of power and gradually restored a structure that was nearly as oppressive as slavery itself. The distortions in people’s lives caused by slavery, like any wound that has never fully healed, break open again and again, cause pain, and reinfect us. Just this week, marchers going from St. Louis to Jefferson City to protest the grand jury decision in the Michael Brown case were met in one rural Missouri town by counter-protesters waving that familiar and predictable symbol of racial hatred and intimidation, the Confederate flag. When I read of events in Ferguson and New York City, the gulf of distrust and misunderstanding that continues to exist between white and black in this country, even the continued insistence that we must identify as white or black, I see a wound of war that has never gone away. And I remember Abraham Lincoln’s prophetic words in his second annual message to Congress: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

My mother’s scrapbook begins with enlistments and deployments, but by the second page the inevitable other stories start to appear. Charles Clark, dead in a Philippine prison camp. John Disher, shot down over the English Channel, in the hospital with an injured foot, returned to service, and killed. Audry Clark, killed in France. And most personal to me, Michael Wiegenstein, lost with all his shipmates when his submarine was sunk in the Pacific.

This year was the 70^th anniversary of my Uncle Mike’s death, so my cousin Joe organized a memorial service this October. Mike’s loss was devastating to my father’s family. So much so, in fact, that none of them liked to talk about Mike, so all I ever knew of him were a few scattered stories about childhood shenanigans – nothing about his young adult years, or what led him into the submarine service in the first place. So when we looked through the boxes and folders that had been collecting in various closets, it was like catching a glimpse of someone familiar and yet not familiar either. In one letter home, he told his brother – my dad – that there was nothing he would rather be doing at that moment than following the plow behind the family mule. We laid a wreath at the courthouse memorial, we visited the cemetery, and except for one elderly aunt and uncle none of us had ever met the man we were memorializing. My cousin remarked that this was part of our loss – that not only had his parents and brothers and sisters lost the young man who went off to war, but we too had lost the grown man we might have known, the older uncle whom we might have visited with and come to appreciate, the man who would have been a help to his parents in their later years, a friend and companion to our parents and us – an entire stream of life that had been cut off at its source. Although this loss is hypothetical and I suppose imaginary in some ways, to my mind it’s just as real as the more visible ones.

That’s the lesson I have learned this year about the wounds of war. For every visible one, there is an invisible one. They’re slow to heal and require deliberate effort, because when we are mired in a pattern of destruction and hatred, the natural tendency is to stay in that pattern. What it takes first is consideration of our losses, a counting up of the cost and a reflection upon it. I never knew my Uncle Mike, but only this year did I realize how much I missed him.

Honest Work, Just Reward

Tags

human nature, Illinois, Quincy, reviews, theater, writing

– That’s the way to please the Lord,

or so says Javert in the musical version of Les Misérables. I had the pleasure of seeing that show at the Quincy (Ill.) Community Theatre last weekend, and for various reasons, that line stuck with me more than it had in previous performances.

Before I go on about that passage, let me gush for a moment about the QCT’s production. Quincy is a town of 40,000, with a community theater that relies on all-volunteer casts (although this production brought in a professional singer to play Jean Valjean). Yet despite those limitations, the QCT brought in a version of Les Misérables that was remarkably robust and accomplished. I give the music director, Larry Finley, a lot of credit for coordinating a tight 20-person pit orchestra with the singers. The performance was a real triumph for a small-city community theater group and a fitting 400th production in its history.

But back to Javert. He speaks that line when he is sending Fantine on her path to ruin, and of course we are meant to recognize it as the heartless abstraction that it is. It’s a way for Javert to not-think about the human being in front of him, casting her as an example of a principle rather than a person with particular circumstances. We all know people like that; I work with some of them, and there are few more frustrating sorts to deal with than those who insist on an inflexible abstraction in the face of compelling circumstances before them.

What struck me about the line this time, though, was not merely that it shows the limitations of Javert’s spirit, but that it’s so palpably false. Some of my dearest people live for their honest work – devote themselves to it – and receive no reward at all. We’ve all known people who have seen their honest and devoted work get snatched away by workplace politics and the selfishness of others.

So what’s a person to do? There’s no good answer. Persist in your work and ignore the reward or lack of reward that may come from it? Nice idea but it feels like surrendering to those who choose to play the game instead of focusing on their proper work. Play the game yourself? That’s abandoning your principles.

Dealing with our fellow human beings is a messy business, and only the Javerts of this world make it tidy in their own minds with comforting, fake abstractions. And who wants to be a Javert?

Radio Interview Time!

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Civil War, Icarians, Illinois, KSMU, Mary Griffith, Michele Skalicky, Quincy, Slant of Light, utopia, WTAD

I’ve done two fun radio interviews in the past week. The first was with Michele Skalicky of Ozarks Public Radio in Springfield…..you can listen to it here.

Then this morning I talked with Mary Griffith of WTAD in Quincy. WTAD is a Quincy institution, and Mary’s show is the best part of its programming. People love to listen to the Mary Griffith show! She keeps things fun and fast-moving most of the time, but I’ve heard her really skewer some of our local politicians sometimes too. Here’s my interview.

More photos

Tags

bookstores, fiction, historical fiction, Illinois, Missouri, Quincy, Unitarian, utopia, writing

Some nice photos, courtesy of my daughter, of some recent appearances.

Talking about utopias at the Quincy Unitarian Church.

Signing at Great Debate Booksin Quincy.

The super-cool merchandise that Expressions by Christine in Quincy came up with to help me promote my book! Authors, take note…..they do wonderful work!

Talking About Utopia

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historical fiction, human nature, Icarians, Illinois, Quincy, Slant of Light, utopia, writing

I recently gave a talk at the Quincy Unitarian Church about the impulse to utopia and why I have found utopian movements fascinating. You can listen to it or read it here.

Next reading/signing

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bookstores, historical fiction, Illinois, Quincy, Slant of Light, Unitarian, writing

This weekend I’ll be doing readings/signings at the Quincy Unitarian Church on Friday evening and at Great Debate Books on Saturday afternoon. Although I am not living in Quincy now, I still consider it “home” and still love to visit the church–in fact, I’ve never transferred my membership out of it, despite my departure. When the folks at the church heard that my book was coming out, they immediately wanted to put on a celebration–so that’s what this will be! Wine and cheese and hors d’oeuvres, with a brief reading and lots of happy conversations.

Then for those who prefer Saturdays, a signing in a more traditional location: Great Debate Books, an independent bookstore at the corner of Sixth and Maine. Looking forward to both events!

Book Launch

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bookstores, Civil War, fiction, historical fiction, Missouri, Missouri Writers Guild, novels, Quincy, Slant of Light, St. Louis, Unitarian

The official launch of Slant of Light will happen on April 19 from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Subterranean Books, 6275 Delmar, in University City (on the Delmar Loop). The location is a bit serendipitous . . . a former student of mine from the 1990s is married to an employee there, so the connection was made.

That weekend, those of you who are attending the Missouri Writers’ Guild conference in St. Louis can pick up a copy there . . . I’ll be signing books on Friday, the 20th, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.

If my Hannibal/Canton/Quincy friends can hold out till May, there will be at least one event up there. Working with the dear folks at the Unitarian Church for a wine & cheese party/book reading & signing . . . specific date and time to be announced.