Coming Soon!

Lucky That Way: Rediscovering My Father's World by Pamela Gerhardt will be available in just a few weeks. Preorder it today!

Lucky That Way, a nuanced, richly engaging memoir, chronicles the joys and tribulations of a daughter who rediscovers her father as he nears the end of his life. Ernie Gerhardt, an artist and teacher, is largely estranged from his five children, but when he suffers a debilitating stroke, his daughter Pamela must fly to Las Vegas to tend to him. When she arrives to find Ernie newly and shockingly fragile, she is hit by an unexpected wave of tenderness. The emerging theme of imperfect humans struggling with life's great mysteries will strike a chord of recognition with the tens of thousands of Baby-Boomers and Gen-Xers who are currently facing similar circumstances with their elderly loved ones. Pamela Gerhardt’s heartfelt story about a family coming to terms with an aging father’s illness and imminent death takes readers on an emotional roller coaster that highlights love, loss, humor, and sadness.

Excerpt

Day 1

I am in the clouds. I am floating.

I am flying to see my father in an intensive care unit, a man I haven’t seen in seven years.

Maybe he is dying. Maybe not.

I am simply moving forward, a couple miles a minute, as it were, thirty-two thousand feet above the Midwest plains.

I am vacant. I am mostly dreading Las Vegas, the city where he was hospitalized while on vacation, a city of phony Sphinxes and plaster Eiffel Towers. I am thinking that when I see him I will ask him, “Couldn’t you have had your stroke in Paris—the real one?”

He will laugh, edit the punch line, add something funnier—“Could have been worse. Paducah.” If he gave his five children a gift, it is irreverence.

When I was a kid he once asked me to make a prank phone call to his boss. He worked as a salesman for a company named G. S. Robins. My two brothers and two sisters and I were well aware of how much he hated his job. Art was his passion. But he had gone to college on the GI Bill, like so many of his peers after the war, and gotten a degree in business. “It wasn’t heard of in our family, in those days, to get a college degree, much less one in art,” he once told me. “I never even considered it.” He found himself driving the Chevrolet long distances during the week to places with lonesome-sounding names like Wichita and Oswego, staying in hotels, returning on Fridays with a backache as he headed to his easel wedged between the washing machine and the tool bench in the basement. His attitude toward his job continued to sour. Sitting at the dinner table, we heard about how much he disliked his boss, a man who smoked fat cigars and pressured Dad to increase sales. One day, when I was eight, Dad decided to go to grad school and get an MFA in art. He graduated in just two years and landed a job as a high school art teacher and quit his job at G. S. Robins. Meanwhile, I had been working on a few bird calls—especially that of the robin.

You might guess where this is going.

The day he quit he dialed the boss’s office number on the beige wall phone in our St. Louis kitchen. “Do your thing,” he whispered to me and stretched the spiral phone cord so that he could hold the receiver near my mouth. I chirped away, doing my best angry robin call, and he hung up, doubling over with laughter.

“We sure showed them,” he said, clutching his stomach, laughing hard enough to produce tears. Even at that age, smiling with my dad as he sputtered over his irreverent joke, I knew I was facing something deeply complicated, a worldview that might cause me trouble in the future.

I am letting the plane ride unfold one minute, one hour at a time. I am thinking of my friends who have gone through something similar in recent years with their own aging parents. How do we find meaning within the sea of statistics on America’s aging population? And why does this feel different, less clarified, than watching my own parents care for their aging parents?

So much has changed. For one, my parents lived a five-minute drive from theirs. We will have stories about all this aging. We will have stories about caregiving and the intimacy that comes with it. We might consult guidebooks and websites. We will learn how to interview directors of assisted living facilities by way of long-distance phone calls. We will learn how to monitor blood pressure and blood sugar. But looking out the window during the four-hour plane ride, I already know: that stuff is the easy part. In my case, at least, something far more challenging is at stake.

I haven’t seen my father in seven years. A stupid story, it goes like this: I asked him one Christmas to control his drinking. But that’s not the whole story. It began after Mom died, when he had decided to fly Debbie, who had been diagnosed with Schizophrenia a few years earlier, to his South Carolina house for Christmas. The oldest of my siblings, she still lived in a small house down the street from our former home in St. Louis. She was stable, but at times believed she was a nun, a prophet, who often tried to call the Pope and the chief of police of Rome to tell them about her prophesies concerning the future of the Church. He, more so than anyone else in the family, struggled in her presence. He said on the phone, “Just don’t leave me alone with her. Promise?” I promised. He started out at noon on Christmas Eve with a celebratory bloody Mary. My other sister and brothers and I would have joined him, but our small kids were clamoring to see the new Disney movie at the theater down the road. I had forgotten my promise. When we returned, Dad was swaying when he walked, and by evening he was passed out on the floorboards of his back porch. Afterward, I returned to my home in the Washington, D.C., area and wrote him a letter: Please stop bingeing like that. You are at your best when you are not drinking. You made your best paintings when you were sober. The movie had been Toy Story 2, and on the eight-hour-drive home to Washington I kept thinking: stupid Disney. Had we stayed at his house, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten so drunk. But that’s not the whole story, is it?

The drinking had begun before that, when Mom was sick. “That’s when it began,” Dad once told me. “The heavy drinking. And it helped. God, those martinis helped.”

I am floating. I am surrounded by revelers pumped up with the prospect of fortune on their way to Vegas, mostly young people who apparently didn’t get the memo that they might someday need to help someone walk and eat and pee. Or they might someday stop seeing a parent. The pilot, clearly enamored with the role of cruise director, announces sights along the way—The Rocky Mountains! The Grand Canyon! and our final destination with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker. “Buckle up and sit back. We’re on our way to Laaaas Vegaaaas!” he says several times during the flight. The cabin erupts in cheers. It feels, however inaccurately, as though I might be the only person on the plane with a different kind of agenda. What that is, I am not entirely sure.

Sneak Peek!

Prairie Sky: A Pilot's Reflections on Flying and the Grace of Altitude by W. Scott Olsen will be available in three to four weeks.  Pre-order it today! 

 

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology.  W. Scott Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground.  While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Excerpt: 

Thin Places and Thick Time

A Duet for Two Worlds

“Ready to go flying?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

“Think I know how to do this?”

Roy Hammerling, a religion professor at the college, sits in the right seat as the Skyhawk enters the runway.

“I’m counting on it,” he says.

The throttle goes forward, and the airplane begins to run down the centerline. It’s a beautiful day for flying. Clear sky and bright sun. A gentle breeze from the north. Huge distances between the very small clouds. The type of day where chasing an idea with an airplane seems perfectly logical and sane. At 60 knots I ease back on the yoke, the nose lifts, and then the rest of the airplane follows. We begin a gentle climbing turn to the west.

“I love that initial feeling,” Roy says. “It’s like you’re tethered to the ground, and then all of a sudden you break free.”

Roy and I are on an expedition this morning, a mission, a voyage of discovery. We are looking for the place where everything changes, the place where the very behavior of the physical earth changes direction. There are signs on the ground that point to the spot, but when you are standing there, the shift is too subtle to see. We are looking for a line reaching back to Pleistocene catastrophe and forward into ecology and myth. We are looking for the Laurentian Divide. And we are looking for something else as well.

Below us the land is green where crops have sprouted, brown where the plants are still emerging. We’ve had three days of hard rain, and overland water moves toward the Maple and Sheyenne and Red Rivers, streams today in depressions you can measure but never see.

“I am always amazed by the takeoff,” he says. “When I was a little kid, I used to imagine it was like there were ropes around the airplane, and you had to break away. And there is this sense of—I don’t know—elation when you break free.”

There is such a thing as accidental genius, I think. Hunting for geology, the normal thing would be to invite a geologist. But the Laurentian Divide in North Dakota is nothing like the Great Divide running the length of the Rocky Mountains. There is no leap and swooning of summit and valley here. Subtle at best, invisible at worst, the Laurentian Divide is more idea than rock, but the evidence of its presence is overwhelming. I mentioned this in a hallway once, and Roy got interested.

If you are looking for the invisible, I think, invite a theologian. I level the wings just fifteen hundred feet over the ground. Traffic on the interstate is light. An egret flies southbound below us.

“I always felt there was a bit of a metaphor for spiritual life in that,” Roy continues. “In the sense that what people always want is a sense of joy or happiness. But there’s always these things tethering you down to the ground. You can’t get away from it. I have a friend who’s a pilot, and I’ve gone up with him a few times. I always have this sense of freedom in flying.”

We’ve begun this conversation a thousand times. In my office, in his office, in hallways and lunch lines, we get to talking about flying and about the small insistent sense that something else is happening beyond the shape of air moving over wings. But then we’ve always paused.

“In the airplane,” I’ve said. “I want to hear what you think while we’re actually flying.”

When I told him I was going to try to find the divide, something huge and historic and mostly invisible unless you’re looking for it, and even then damn near impossible to fix precisely, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We’ve delayed this conversation so long, it nearly erupts.

“Do you know what that means?” he asks. “That feeling at takeoff?”

“Transformation,” I say. “It’s a leap of faith, perhaps a leap into faith. It’s your mind telling your body to relax—the physics and the math work pretty well.”

“Some people never get over that fear, though,” he says. “Some people can never make that leap. Just like some people sometimes in the religious life never get over certain fears; they build up regulations and walls and rules. They do things that keep them from flying. And it seems to me that the spiritual life is about letting go, is about being free and trusting. There is a sense of mystery about it. There is always a sense of mystery. Like right now, I look over, and you don’t even have your hands on the controls.”

I smile and point at the autopilot in the panel.

“Oh,” he says, laughing. “See? Mystery explained by a higher power.”

I remember a map I have at home that shows the rock underneath the Dakota soils. Like nearly every map, it’s an aerial perspective. Archean basement rock, billions of years old, from the time when continents first formed and life, nonnucleated single-celled hopes called prokaryotes, first appeared, hides under Fargo. Heading west, however, the rock quickly becomes Cretaceous. The rock of Tyrannosaurus rex. The rock of Giganotosaurus and Triceratops. The rock of Pangaea’s breakup. The rock of the Western Interior Seaway, an ocean in the middle of the continent. The rock of a meteor falling on the Yucatán and killing nearly everything. Keep going west and the rock keeps getting younger. But none of it is visible now. The planet cooled. The glaciers came, scraped every hilltop, and filled every valley with gravel and sand. An ice sheet named Laurentide pushed the Missouri River valley into shape. And when the glaciers moved back, the meltwater Lake Agassiz, the largest inland sea in North American history, deposited sediment and clay. There are marks in the North Dakota soil that reveal where icebergs trapped in retreating pack ice scraped the lake-bottom sediment. You cannot see them from the ground.

“You know,” I say, “I have been told that there is not one single description in the Bible of an angel in the act of landing. There is one scene where a couple of them are zipping around a living room, but otherwise they are almost always in the air. And if they are on the ground, they are frequently in disguise, appearing as commonplace humans. So it would be possible to argue that their true appearance, the place where they can reveal their true nature, is airborne. It may be forcing the idea a bit, coming from a pilot, but it does strike me that there is something intuitive there. Something true about the human character.”

“You can think of Ezekiel being taken up in the fiery chariot, of Jesus’s ascending into clouds, and it lends itself to the idea that heaven and the holy are somewhere above.”

“These guys don’t just dissolve,” I say. “They don’t just fade away into some other state of being. They rise. They take off. They fly.”

“Saint Augustine,” Roy says, “in his Confessions has this great line. He says something like ‘Oh, God, are you the God of the heavens? And if so, are the birds more holy because they fly closer to you?’ He knows that God is in some type of heavenly place. But the question is, where is that place?”

“Today,” I say, “it’s fifteen hundred feet over Dakota farmland.”

“Perhaps not,” Roy says. “Augustine concludes that the way people need to fly like birds is to go within.” He looks out the window. “But I will admit, if Augustine had a Cessna, he might have changed his mind.”

A HOME RUN FOR READERS

Allow me to pitch you a question, straight down the line, no knuckle, about as slow as the trajectory of a throw by the person covering third base in your local church's slow-pitch softball league: What is the absolute most American thing? This is not meant to be a curve ball. After careful consideration of what exactly might best represent our country, some might say, well, hamburgers and hot dogs. This is a fair answer. Hollywood? Sure, that's good, too. It's clearly open to debate. But one of the safest answers is the sport often referred to as "our nation's pastime": baseball. I don't follow baseball closely, but I'll admit that it pretty much tops the list of the stars-and-stripesiest things I can think of. Here is that list:

1) baseball
2) cowboy hats
3) cherry pie
4) monster trucks
5) reality television
6) owning several Great Danes
7) motorcycle gangs
8) patriotism
9) country music
10) media conglomerates

We at the University of Missouri Press have published many books about baseball. In fact, three of our fall paperbacks are about the sport, and they're all grand slams. So in the interest of keeping the Fourth of July spirit going, let's take a look at these baseball books and get our America on.


Branch Rickey, one of baseball’s foremost innovators and talent scouts, once said that in 1922 George Sisler was “the greatest player that ever lived.” Sisler played with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Rogers Hornsby, all of whom considered "Gorgeous George" their equal. Yet Sisler has faded from baseball's collective consciousness. Now in The Sizzler, this “legendary player without a legend” gets the treatment he deserves. Rick Huhn presents the story of one of baseball’s least appreciated players and studies why his status became so diminished. Huhn argues that the answer lies somewhere amid the tenor of Sisler’s times, his own character and demeanor, the kinds of individuals who are chosen as our sports heroes, and the complex definition of fame itself.

Bob Gibson remains one of the most unique, complex, and beloved players in Cardinals history. Gibson's Last Stand places his final years on the team within the context of American history and popular culture. During the late 1960s, exorbitant salaries and free agency were threatening to change baseball forever, and Gibson’s pitching success caused team owners to think fans wanted only base hits and home runs. The action of the game, both on and off the field, is interjected with interesting and detailed tidbits on players’ backgrounds that often tie them to famous players of the past, current stars, and well-known contemporary places.

“If You Were Only White” explores the legacy of one of the most exceptional athletes ever, Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Paige was arguably one of the world’s greatest pitchers and a premier star of Negro Leagues Baseball, but in this biography Donald Spivey reveals Paige to have been much more than just a blazing fastball pitcher. Through chronicling Paige’s life from his birth in Alabama to his death in Kansas City, Spivey reveals a man who not only battled the color line but was intertwined with many of the most important issues of the times in U.S. and African American history. With baseball as his platform, Paige pushed the boundaries of segregation and bridged the racial divide, and his performance refuted the lie that black baseball was inferior to white baseball. His was a contribution to civil rights of a different kind—his speeches and demonstrations expressed through his performance on the mound.