The Autumn of Our Leaves

From Decorah, Iowa newspapers

For a long time, I was an Iowan. Not a native Iowan. An accidental tourist, as Anne Tyler might have said, and did. When I took the job in Iowa, friends asked, first, where Iowa was, and next, where Decorah was in Iowa. I told them that if you drew a triangle from Burr Oak, down to Little Turkey, and over to Ludlow, Decorah would be right in the middle.

Even after 29 years--a longer time than I had ever lived anywhere--I never felt like an Iowan. We still have a log house in Iowa, where Mari and I were married, and where many of our warmest memories are rooted, but I was always accidentally in Iowa.

Something said at coffee this morning caused me to think about Iowa; about the nature of the state. Later in the day, I read an article sent to me by Marius, describing the new President of Grinnell College in (of all places!) Grinnell, Iowa. Raynard Kington is Black. He is gay, too. And married to Peter Daniolos. They have two adopted children: Emerson and Basil (ba-SEEL). Before coming to Grinnell, Kington was the Director of the National Institutes of Health for ten years.

The Iowa Supreme Court recognized the legality of gay marriages. Iowa is like that. At the same time, some of the most right-wing politicians in the country are from Iowa. Some of the most liberal and progressive politicians are from Iowa, too. Iowa is Meredith Willson's Music Man state:

And we're so by God stubborn

We can stand touchin' noses

For a week at a time

And never see eye-to-eye.

But we'll give you our shirt

And a back to go with it

If your crops should happen to die.

Iowa is German farmer stubborn. It is Lutheran certain, and Roman Catholic authoritarian, and Methodist helpful. It is right-wing, and left-wing, and no wings at all: Iowa doesn't fly, anyway. It walks, and drives a pickup. Iowa is somewhere between being small-town smug and gossipy-mean, and being prairie-loam deep with kindness.

Grinnell College is by no means typical of Iowa. It is one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation. It is both an exception to the town it takes its name from, and perfectly suited to it, because it works, and you cannot quite explain why. You know you should expect Grinnell College in Iowa to choose a black, gay president, and you cannot explain that, either. You expect the President to have an adopted son whose name is pronounced as Greeks say it.

Mari understands that. She is a native Iowan. Sometimes I don't understand her, either, but there she is, like the state, a surprise. A down-to-earth, amazing surprise, from a state with more private colleges than any state west of the Mississippi.

It is to wonder!

Comments

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