A Conscientious Life (Sailing Against the Wind)

Contents

Dedication and Author Note

THE EARLY YEARS

THE COLLEGE YEARS

FATHER’S FUNERAL

THE PSYCHIATRIST’S COUCH

BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

THE DREAM

THE NEIGHBORLY SALESMAN

CARL’S DEMISE

LOST

JON’S POETRY

EPILOGUE

The book weaves a compelling story line that certainly engaged me. I think the author’s imagery is colorful, and capturing.

Dr. Darold Treffert, Author and Autism Expert, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin

Overall, the book is an excellent read. Since it covers many parts of life, it has a very wide appeal. Those who would enjoy this book would be: those who are very politically active or spend their time keeping informed, those who have had trouble relating to their parents, those who have felt any uncertainty in their lives, those who have had to deal with the grief of their parent’s deaths, and finally, those who are the parent of a child with autism.

James Williams, Autism writer and nationally-known speaker, Chicago, Illinois

It has such a powerful voice . . . most people would love to be able to write a book with your talents.

Maeve Quinn, former Sheboygan School Board member

The author shows a tremendous ability to capture the human condition. His work takes us from early stages in life through college years and the loss of a close family member, and beyond. We can all relate to this. His search for the central characters’ identity reminds us of our own adolescent phase in life, and how we work through it. In sum, this book does an excellent job of capturing that which we all know. The title does the book justice: It truly is ‘A Conscientious Life.’’

Michael J. Tollifson, Singer/Songwriter, Sheperdstown, West Virginia

I think the dramatic arc has to do with the main character’s honesty, genuine heart and naivety confronting a cruel and unfeeling world and the challenge to incorporate that new sense of realism into his world while still retaining and even deepening the main character’s humane way of being in the world and with others around him. The razor’s edge of that confrontation would seem to be the foreshadowed and unexpected burden of living with an autistic child.

Fred Hersom, longtime friend and musician, Concord, California

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.

—John Burroughs

Dedication and Author Note

This book is dedicated to my wonderful mother Jane Elizabeth McAndrew, a lover of great books, and a compassionate human being, whose politics have always been person-centered. It is also dedicated to my father, John Burton Mc Andrew, a giant in my life, without whom, I would feel a great emptiness. I will always remember my father as a sensitive, intelligent and compassionate man. The book is also dedicated to the memory of my Uncle Charles Jefferson Hitt (1935-2007.) Charlie, you were always in my corner. May you rest in peace. The book is also dedicated to the spirit of the late Harvey Stower, former Wisconsin Assemblyman and mayor of Amery, Wisconsin. Harvey you were a great friend. Thanks also to the outstanding writers and thinkers who have inspired me including Dr. Darold Treffert, John Updike, Mitch Albom, Kurt Vonnegut, Garrison Keillor, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Leo Buscaglia, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein and others who have motivated me on many levels to put my thoughts down on paper and share them with others. Also, nature writer Margaret Jarek was gracious enough to let me share some of her wonderful excerpts of her writing in this novel. I also owe very special thanks to author and sports journalist Mitch Albom. After talking with him for 30 minutes during a WHBL Radio interview in 2005, I knew I wanted to give fiction a shot. I knew it in my heart that I was destined to write a very special book. Mitch talked about the magic and wonder of creating plot and characters and about how his first work of fiction, The Five People You Meet in Heaven was a fantastic and inventive process. He told me it represented a new freedom not felt in his first non-fiction book Tuesdays With Morrie. Thanks also to my wonderful wife Debbie who patiently put up with me during my intense days of editing and tweaking the manuscript. By the way, the characters in my book are purely fictional but to some varying degrees may represent some characteristics of people in real life. Any exact or complete likeness or resemblance to anyone in real life is purely coincidental.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight

To me did seem

Apparell’d in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it has been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more!

The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where’er I go,

That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth.

from Ode: Incarnations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth

"What keeps us alive, what allows us to endure? I think it is the hope of loving."

Master Eckhart

THE EARLY YEARS

The amiable six year-old Jonathan Stark walked slowly and carefully across the front lawns during the annual Cub Scout project. It was a beautiful and calm spring morning in Wisconsin. With young Jon were members of his Cub pack sauntering along in mostly obedient fashion and following their scout leader. They were picking up bags of food they had requested the week before for the Cubs for the Homeless drive. The pack leader was a ruddy-faced rotund woman who was often prone to intermittent loud barks. Her troop tried to stay in line—but sometimes failed to meet Kari’s strict expectations. Kari said felt a compulsion to run the Cub Scout troop because nobody else in town seemed to want to. It was a trip down Barker, Cherry, Adams, Schultz, Stoll, and Monarch Streets and then along Ondorf, St. James, Haux and Park Avenues. A vehicle drove down each street and avenue to collect the food bags. A lone robin pranced upon Mr. Templeton’s garage roof. Apparently he had lost his flock and was all alone. A tomcat in a nearby window sill eyed the bird with rapt attention, so focused on his potential prey, he had awareness of the transparent barrier between himself and a potential carnivorous victory.

The Ford truck picking up food bags was driven by Kari Bender’s husband Dirk. His friends called him Razor because he was hardly ever clean-shaven. Dirk’s cigarette smoldered just a couple of inches away from his chapped lips. Dirk played a conservative talk show on the Ripon, Wisconsin AM radio station called Clarke Smitherton, America’s Patriot. He revealed a smirk when Clark talked about the liberals and how they were ruining America and trashing the proud and sacred place America was meant to be. He talked about the unions and how they were all corrupt and were going to be the downfall of the entire nation. The loud voice over the radio carried to the sidewalks and to the ears of some of the young scouts. The tone, anger and attitude irritated young Jonathan, but he was far too young to put his feelings into words or to understand the complexity and abstractness of the politics involved. The course nature of the articulation over the airwaves seemed to piece the cool air with its belligerence and vindictiveness.

Kindergartner Toby was Kari and Dirk’s oldest son and he boasted that he would someday drive a big cement truck like his Daddy. He was also a bit of a show off and handled any opportunity for negative or positive attention with uncanny skill. He was known as the first grader who nudged and tested the other children, but he didn’t intend to be a mean-spirited person. He didn’t want to see any of the other kids suffer. He bullied and prodded Jonathan frequently, but it was mostly playful and not malicious. Why are you so quiet? Are you still a baby? Then he would mix it with, It’s OK Jonny, I used to be quiet too. Toby knew Jon was smart and deep inside was jealous of the intelligence he would never have. When teased, Jonathan would give him a pensive look and he wouldn’t even think of jumping into any kind of retaliatory response. Laconic and with a stoic countenance, the young boy trudged on. Jon thought it was better to be quiet than to tempt a bully. Jon’s mother always told him that it wasn’t worth it to challenge a bully’s games, and that it would only bring you to their level. He was learning to be quite good at playing along and being safe. In his young life, Jon would find, ironically, that carefulness would be his best friend.

When we are very young our horizons are close by, but as we grow and mature and carefully experience life, our horizons began to expand, giving us an ever-deepening perspective on life and a broadening concept of what constitutes reality. Curiosity is the great impetus that constantly urges us forward in our journey to discover what lies around the next bend in the path or over the next hill. With an ever-expanding consciousness, the puzzle of life accumulates more pieces and the picture becomes more inclusive and better defined.

Margaret Lathrop from Rainbows of Hope

Jonathan’s mother Karen is a petite woman, about 5-foot three inches tall. Most of her friends find her to be an intense woman in many ways. She appears to put an immense amount of thought into anything she does. Karen has a wonderful folksy sense of humor and a way of making people feel very comfortable. She is cautious like Jon but smiles and laughs more often. Karen moved with her husband to Meadeville three years ago. She always said that she felt that Meadeville’s pleasant countryside was a kind, peaceful and rustic atmosphere . . . a good place to raise a family.

Karen is also an artist who paints competently on canvass when she has time, but she rarely had time, because she poured so much energy into her family obligations. Some of her talents would remain mostly hidden forever. When she did make it into the art room, she loved to paint faces. She would label the finished pieces emotions such as Trepidation, Joy, Loathing, Humor or Consternation. She won an award from the local community college for a display she did at the local Windmater Art Center. Karen, college educated and prematurely gray, walks softly but carries a big stick. When crossed she gives her true opinions, but when not crossed goes along with the status quo 99-percent of the time.

Jon’s hometown of Meadeville was incorporated in 1857 and was a railroad town for much of its history. To this day, the Railroad Inn has the best food in town. The Trails Inn chili dog was Jon’s favorite. Howard was the city to Meadeville’s immediate south, directly south of Lake Omaha. Howard was about ten times bigger than Meadeville’s population of 5,611 people. Howard was where Karen’s uncle worked for 30 years. He was a reference librarian at the city library back when they had card catalogs.

Back in 1970, Karen was confident that her life, honest husband and her two young boys would help take her family on a journey of interesting and meaningful proportions. Jonathan’s father Daniel was an all-state basketball player at Kirk City High School in central Wisconsin in the 1940’s. Daniel was a modest man of Horatio Alger type achievements. His older brother Paul David died when he was 16 in an automobile accident, which was tough to overcome considering Paul David was idolized by his little brother. Daniel’s character was strong and he bounced back, proving to his family that he could be a nearly straight-A student. He was in the top 25 in his college class and top five of his class at the University of Nebraska Dental School. He is a quiet, intense and complex man who loves his classical music (especially Haydn, J.S. Bach and Mozart), fishing and sailing. He never boasted about his accomplishments. He was a quiet observer of life . . . a humble man. Dr. Stark worked long hours and had a great compassion for his patients but at the same time cared intensely (like no one would know) about his boys. When Jonathan was in the elementary grades in the 1960’s, his mother Karen took night classes at King Hill Community College to become a part-time nursing assistant. In 1966, Jon’s little brother was two and a lot of work for his parents. Murray was bigger and more muscular than his older brother. Jon bore a bit of a scrawny build and was more of the bookworm type. He was transparently shy and seemed the opposite of pretentious. Jon was conscientious and Murray was audacious. Jon was more of an appeaser and his brother was more recalcitrant. Jon’s problem was that he was almost invisible because he was painfully careful.

One of Jon’s favorite things to do with his father was to watch the TV show called The 21st Century with Walter Cronkite. Young Jon also loved astronomy. He studied the solar system in 3rd grade and memorized all the diameters of the planets and their distances to the sun. (The boy’s enthusiasm for space earned him an A for that unit in Mrs. Magnuson’s third grade classroom. Mrs. Magnuson would wonder why this boy with all these gifts would remain so silent so much of the time. She watched his painful shyness and wondered what it would be like if he were more outgoing and openly communicative.) Jon and his father would talk together about how wonderful the future will be when new technology and scientific achievements transform our lives in the decades to come. (Later in life, Jon would be very appreciative of how positive his father was in encouraging a sense of wonder about the future and this fascinating world of ours. Dr. Stark was planting seeds of positive thinking.)

Daniel, sometimes nursing an after work Manhattan on the rocks or Bourbon, would talk about how great his boys were. He loved his boys so much. Young Murray was the jock, but no predictions were made overtly about Jonathan. He felt invisible sometimes. He was called special and conscientious a lot. He didn’t quite know what that meant. How did he rank in the family scheme of things? Murray already seemed to be possessed with a somewhat brash sense of self and crass sense of humor, while Jonathan was more careful, more introspective. The word that always popped up on his report card was conscientious. Mrs. Magnuson used that word a lot too. He didn’t have a full sense of what that word meant, and how could he at the tender age of eight? His sense of self was still in serious question. His self-concept had a lot of evolving to do.

Jon worshiped his father and felt his strong compassion for the working man, for those less fortunate than himself. He always emphasized a great empathy for the rights of workers. He talked to Jon about his respect for those who would go to jail for justice like Steven Biko, Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi. He also talked a lot about the political courage and compassion of the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Daniel said he was deeply saddened by the death of JFK because he could convey so much hope to so many people. He talked often about his idols who risked their lives for freedom and sometimes went to prison for their political beliefs.

As long as there is a soul in prison I’m not free.

Eugene Debs

When Jon was eight, his father felt the need to serve his community in a new and different capacity. He decided to run for school board. He was especially passionate about funding for special needs programming and how it was as he said, always taking a backseat to reading, writing and arithmetic. A nephew of his named Lane was diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia at the age of eight just a few months ago, so the passion burned stronger for personal reasons. He also was passionate about teaching of critical thinking. He felt that schools were not for teaching kids how to conform but for continually building and reinforcing critical thinking skills. His sister Marian was on school committees in Milwaukee for a long time and critical thinking was one of her mantras as well. Daniel respected Marian’s boldness for saying what she thought, and being unafraid of the political attacks she might invite.

For a long time, Daniel disapproved of how the Meadeville Superintendent of Schools Tim Oreilly seemed to be in secret collusion with the school board president on many of the critical education decisions yet to be made. The administration and school board members wore buttons that said . . . CHILDREN FIRST! but, many people knew it really was the Superintendent Oreilly and the Tim Hanley agenda. It seemed as secretive as the Nixon administration sometimes. Hanley was criticized by the public for seemingly going along with every big decision that was the brain child of Dr. Oreilly. It was this factor that made the eldest Stark very nervous. He was nervous about so much power in the hands of so few in town. Hanley’s brother owned Grand Junction Motors. The company bought 40 acres of school property at a good price in the 1960’s and opened a car lot. Environmental groups protested because a city park was supposed to go there, but Oreilly shot them down in the local newspaper, the Smith County Leader. He said the environmentalists were pathetic tree huggers and misinformed idealists who were naïve about the business world. When pressed by a competent reporter, he expressed that all liberals were mentally ill.

Some said Superintendent Oreilly had a shady background. Oreilly’s father Arlen owned Arlen’s Good Times Supper Club. There were rumors of drugs, gambling and even some prostitution at the establishment, but many of the richest people in town went there on a regular basis. Jon was too young to perceive the reality of the corruption of the human soul which may have been going on there. Arlen died in his late 70’s of a disease nobody would talk about. It was never revealed. Dr. Stark would take Jonathan and Murray to Arlen’s a couple of times and in later years Jon would reflect on how fake Arlen seemed when he talked to people. When his father would take him to the restaurant as a young child, with brother Murray in tow, Arlen would say with a gregarious smile, Dr. Stark, so nice to see you! He would then turn to the bar and engage in extremely loud and borderline vulgar talk. Young Jon noticed this but said nothing. There was something deeply wrong with that guy, thought Jon, something far too rough about his character. It appeared he enjoyed talking to his Dad because of his status as a dentist and not for who he was. Jon was angry about this man’s crassness and insensitivity. Later Jon would find out that Arlen had ties to the mafia. That cheerful, friendly guy act was apparently all a charade. He had a heart cold as ice.

Karen said she wasn’t anxious to have her husband involved in another big undertaking, but she wanted him to do something he felt was his responsibility to the community. She also might have been worried too much that Daniel was away from the family enough and that more meetings may not be good for the boys. But she felt that if Daniel was happy, the whole family would be happy. Karen’s Mom (Grandma Janice everyone called her) said several times, Karen does everything for Daniel. The boy didn’t stop and analyze that too much. He also had a sense his Mom was psychologically confined in some way, but couldn’t define it. Young Jon also thought there was something wrong with his Mom’s lack of 100-percent freedom. She had the material things, but was she psychologically free? Was she totally free to be herself? He felt guilty for even thinking it—that his Mom, in the service of others was not living a full and satisfying life, that her self esteem was somewhat injured by this preoccupation with Daniel’s success.

Two years later Jon was almost out of the elementary grades. The scene is Truman Elementary School. The door to the classroom opened abruptly. Jonathan’s 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Brumwell, stepped back in after consulting with someone in the hallway. Eyes of students were meticulously glancing toward the chalkboard, except for young Jon’s whose were drifting on this windy spring day. 10 year-old Jon seemed wholly captivated by a bronze statue through the classroom window. It was a robust bronze of the late Democratic Senator Harvey Stausen, a man from Meadeville who became a U.S. Senator through his brilliant speaking skills, his grit and stubborn determination. He was portrayed by a statue in the midst of fiery oratory.

Stausen had also been an assemblyman and was mayor of the town before succumbing to the horrors of cancer. Politics by its very