Safety lights
by Anton Zuiker on January 7, 2025
I’m glad I went for a run tonight, but running in the dark with ice patches still around wasn’t exactly smart. Luckily, I had some moonlight and clear paths and my run was uneventful.
At other seasons, running in the dark is not safe because of the copperhead snakes that are on the move. Looks like I blogged about that before with a reminder to take my darn flashlight.
The more dangerous moment of the evening was when I was placing the recycling bins at the street. I’d just gotten the last one in place when a car with a missing headlight came precariously close to me as it whizzed down the road. The streetlight that usually illuminates the gravel driveway at busy Smith Level Road is dark because our neighbor stopped paying for it (the light does shine into his house) and I haven’t contacted the power company to ask about alternative safety lights.
Guess that should be my first phone call tomorrow.
Iolani Palace
by Anton Zuiker on January 6, 2025
When the January 2025 issue of the Atlantic arrived in mid-December, I immediately sat down to read the long feature about Hawaiian independence, The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back.
In the early 1990s, I lived in Honolulu for nearly two years after I graduated from college. My day job was as a writer for Island Scene Magazine, a publication of the Blue Cross insurance company. Many of my writing assignments were about the history and culture of the islands, including this story I wrote about Mauna Kea on the Big Island. In the evenings, when I wasn’t playing pick-up soccer on the campus of UH Manoa, I was taking an introductory Hawaiian language class there.
My work and my studies meant that I was somewhat informed of the history of the islands. I also was aware of the desire for justice and independence. But I was haole, a temporary resident, itinerant, and I moved back to Cleveland (for love!). I have good memories of my time in Hawaii, including all the great hikes I took on weekends.
In 2021, we took the family for a surprise December vacation on Oahu. Each day, we drove past the historic Iolani Palace. It looked different to me because the gates were closed and access was restricted to visiting hours and paid tours. On that trip, and especially when I was reading The Atlantic feature about Hawaiian independence, I felt a wave of shame to realize I had added to the insult of the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani. When I had lived in Honolulu, the hiking club met on the mauka side of the Palace, which meant I often parked my beater car inches from the stone walls and below the room where the queen had been imprisoned for many months. I wish I would have brought to Iolani Palace the same reverence that I had shown the ancient Hawaiian petroglyphs and heiau around the islands.
As I’m finishing this post, I’m reminded that today is the fourth anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by the election-denying horde. Clearly there’s a through line that connects the American overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1894 to the almost-coup in 2021. My hope is that democracy and justice and peace will prevail in both Washington and Hawaii.
Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ʻĀina i ka Pono
“The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.”
Desire: The 5 U2 songs I'd play for you
by Anton Zuiker on January 5, 2025
The U2X channel on SiriusXM often features listeners describing their individual playlists of five U2 songs—the U2 songs I desire the most. As the guest deejay tees up each song, we hear about loved ones, memorable U2 concerts, life and career milestones, and other short anecdotes about what the song means to the person.
I’ve been a fan of U2 since I was in high school, and here are the songs I would play:
- Where the Streets Have No Name from the Joshua Tree album.
- Silver and Gold from the Desire album.
- Mothers of the Disappeared from the Joshua Tree album.
- Stuck in a Moment from the All That You Can’t Leave Behind album.
- Bad on the Wide Awake in America record.
Here’s why:
The first U2 album I bought, on cassette tape in DeKalb in 1987, was The Joshua Tree. My cousin had lent me his yellow Sony Walkman, but I had used my summer money to buy an AIWA personal music device and so most likely listened to the cassette first on that. A couple days a week, after walking the soybean fields, I would drive my big old car to a soccer field on the campus of Northern Illinois University. I arrived early for the pick-up game, so I would sit in the car with the windows down, listening through headphones to that album. Where the Streets Have No Name was my favorite song. It was a nice interlude between work and play. When my teammates and friends arrived, I’d join them on the pitch. To this day, I remember a goal I scored on a long cross from the sideline, the arc of the shot merged with the remembered sounds of that U2 song.
I worked as a new student orientation advisor over two summers during college at John Carroll University. One of those summers, my friends and I watched the U2 concert movie Rattle and Hum multiple times. The Harlem scenes and the gospel rendition of Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For were alway good, but I most liked Silver and Gold, especially when Bono starts to lecture the audience about political and racial equality and then catches himself and says, “Am I buggin’ you? I don’t mean to bug ya.” My friends and I were committed to peace and justice; two of them would serve in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and I’d eventually join the U.S. Peace Corps. (The newsweeklies at the time were running cover stories asking if Generation X cared about anything. That fuckin’ bugged me.) When we weren’t welcoming new students or rewatching Rattle and Hum, I was watching the World Cup.
I graduated college, deferred my Peace Corps application, and moved to Honolulu. One day after work I walked to the bookstore in nearby Ala Moana Mall, where I purchased my very first issue of the New Yorker magazine. This issue was devoted entirely to a single long feature story about the 1981 massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador. At JCU, I had studied liberation theology, learned about the life and death of Archbishop Óscar Romero, and read dense, intense novels in a class called Latin American Dictators in Literature. So Mark Danner’s investigation about El Mozote held my attention. I’m sure I listened to U2’s Mothers of the Disappeared, a sombre song about killings by dictatorial regimes, at least a few times during the week it took me to read the article. (Often after listening to this U2 song, I’ll listen to these other songs that are in the family: Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, and both Fathers Footsteps and Mother by Rhythm Corps.)
After college, and Hawaii, and Peace Corps service with my wife, Erin, in the Republic of Vanuatu, we landed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with an infant daughter. Erin was in graduate school, so during that first year little Anna and I explored campus on foot and took drives around the Piedmont. Anna did not like being in the car seat and she screamed her discomfort. I discovered that she’d go quiet when I played “Down in the River to Pray” from the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. We listened to that song more times than I’d watched Rattle and Hum, and when even Alison Krauss couldn’t get Anna to calm down, I’d play Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of but I’d change the words:
“You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a car seat
And now you can’t get out of it
Don’t say that later will be better
Now you’re stuck in a car seat
And you can’t get out of it.”
Anna grew out of the car seat, grew up to be an amazing young woman, and she doesn’t seem to hold that loving taunt against me.
For Christmas 2023, Erin gave me the perfect gift—U2’s four-song Wide Awake in America on vinyl, which she found in an antiques shop in nearby Pittsboro. I had purchased a turntable, stereo receiver, and good speakers soon after we moved into our new house, and we’d begun to build a record collection. This gift from Erin included Bad, song that I hadn’t really paid attention to in the decades I’ve followed U2. But in the last couple of years, whenever U2X plays the song, I turn up the volume and sing along. I’ve also rewatched the 1985 U2 performance at Live Aid in which they sang Bad. I watched much of that epic concert on the television in the basement of my aunt’s house, though I’m not certain I saw the U2 set.
So those are the five U2 songs I’d play on the radio if given the chance.
And if you happen to visit me here in Chapel Hill, I’d play a few bonus U2 songs: Grace; Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around the World; The Wanderer; and 13 (There Is a Light). I’d close out our session with a record by Josh Ritter and a listen to his gentle song, A Certain Light.
U2 has been a constant in my life for nearly 40 years and I’ll keep listening as long as I can. (Another constant: soccer.)
Cathedral winds
by Anton Zuiker on January 4, 2025
There’s a big storm brewing across the midwest and Washington is already bracing for the cold snows to come. Erin and I took Malia for breakfast and then shopping for groceries this morning and then said our goodbyes. Instead of getting to the Smithsonian museum as we had planned, we opted for a short stop at the Washington National Cathedral, where the winds were howling at the awesome bronze gates at the front doors and people were getting tours in the soaring nave.
Next Thursday, Jimmy Carter and his remarkable century of life and service will be honored in a state funeral at the cathedral.
Carter was the first president I was aware of as a child and I admired him then and throughout the decades. Soon after I moved to Hawaii, he was on a book tour and I waited in line at Ala Moana to buy a copy of his memoir, Turning Point. I’m holding it now and looking at his signature. A few years later, when he was promoting his book of poems, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, Erin and I went through the line at Booksellers in Beachwood. President Carter’s work on fair elections and global health inspired both our graduate studies in public health and medical journalism.
I wish I could be in Washington for the memorials to President Carter, but I’m glad to have stepped into the sacred space in which he will be remembered by this nation.
Capitol calling
by Anton Zuiker on January 3, 2025
Quick overnight road trip to Washington to deliver Malia to her apartment and spring semester. We’re planning to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture tomorrow and we’ll be within view of the U.S. Capitol, where a Republican-dominated Congress has opened. I plan to give them all a polite wave while I hold my nose and hope they do something good for the country this year.