Mim Scalin and Chris Krieger

[00:00] CHRIS KRIEGER: I'd like to go first.

[00:03] MIM SCALIN: Okay, I'll read your bio.

[00:07] MIM SCALIN: Okay.

[00:10] MIM SCALIN: Reading suspense fiction, socioeconomic, historical, environmental, non-fiction and woodworking. Woodworking and cooking. Sounds great.

[00:20] MIM SCALIN: Quirky, well read, world travel, divorced, father of one daughter, comfortable in the wood shop woods. library kitchen, familiar with XPSL, Excel word, ArcGIS, but just got her smartphone a year ago. Sometimes profanity still involves Papa. Read a lot, TV only linked to a DVD player for 10 years. Convinced grandchildren will rightly curse us for their mad backs like world if we don't change soon.

[00:49] MIM SCALIN: Okay.

[00:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, okay, ma'am, you're in Richmond, Virginia. Your typical voting preference is Democrat. You lean towards liberal. Your interests are learning other languages, reading, writing postcards to voters. You grew up in an ethnic neighborhood in Chicago, father and grandparents, immigrants. You studied piano, went to art school, moved east, lived in Brooklyn with husband, taught elementary school, taught in university, started in an adoption agency, was a theater stage manager, had lots of different jobs, love languages. Some of your attributes are recent events or parent, grandparent, recently lost a loved one, sorry to hear that, and animal lover. Okay, there we go. Now we just start, is this your first OSS conversation?

[01:47] MIM SCALIN: Yes, it is.

[01:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay. What made you decide to do this interview conversation today?

[01:56] MIM SCALIN: My son and another, he's an artist, and another artist, Alfonso from Colombia, they did painted a mural based on two.

[02:06] MIM SCALIN: Women who met once.

[02:08] SPEAKER D: Them.

[02:09] MIM SCALIN: And they have the women in the mural and they have various words that.

[02:14] MIM SCALIN: They quote from them on the wall. And the main word for the whole thing was reliability. And it was just so beautiful.

[02:24] MIM SCALIN: And we went to the, quote unquote, unveiling of this mural, which is a big wall with a parking lot in front of it. And I met the two women and people from Local, whatever. And so they were asking people who wanted to do this. And my son had done it twice and he said, yeah, you should do it. And somebody else was there and everybody said, do it, do it. And I went, okay, a friend of mine said it. So I said, okay, I'll sign up.

[02:50] SPEAKER D: I'll talk to people.

[02:52] MIM SCALIN: And then I had a guy from Florida. I said, oh, I'll talk to him. And he never showed up in the room. I waited 30 minutes and I got stood up. So it was like, oh my gosh, this is not, this is crazy. So then when you asked me, I said, oh, what the heck? Why not? You're in Oklahoma, you're out there in the Midwest. I used to be in Illinois. You know, let's, we'll have a chat. I don't know. I just, anyway, my son said, you gotta do this, just do this. So that's why. And because you asked me, I just said, okay, I didn't have to choose.

[03:28] MIM SCALIN: When I was sent an offer to Liz, I was too overwhelmed by all the different choices and I didn't know they were, everybody was interesting in different ways.

[03:37] SPEAKER D: Sure.

[03:37] MIM SCALIN: So you said, you said, you want to chat? And I went, okay. And then when you didn't show up on the first chat, I was like, oh, am I doing this wrong? Am I in pressing the wrong button? And then you explained what it was. And then that was another thing that.

[03:55] MIM SCALIN: That interested me in speaking with you.

[03:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay. Yeah, that's, well, you know, I'm not, I don't consider myself a 100% liberal or conservative. I'm very liberal on some things and very conservative on others, but it's all based on certain, just a few beliefs or values I hold. I try not to let any label or group do my thinking for me. I feel very strongly about that. And, but I get a lot of information to come to positions and I think they're important. And, and so I'm very extremely frustrated with people who, who just get all of their information from one or two sources. They don't vet it. and, you know, I'm thinking particularly of Fox. I call it Foxaganda. And it, I'm just furious that they have taken over so much of our media.

[04:59] SPEAKER D: And.

[05:01] CHRIS KRIEGER: I'm just, I'm very alarmed. I don't see us going in very many good places without some big changes. And, and my problem is, is whenever I try and talk with people about.

[05:12] SPEAKER D: Things.

[05:15] CHRIS KRIEGER: I feel like I present 100 reasons for why I got to a point of view. And I feel like a lot of people, at least around here in Oklahoma, say, I have nothing to refute anything you've said, but I refuse to accept it at all. And that just makes me want to scream.

[05:38] MIM SCALIN: So why did you choose to to speak to me. What it what I mean, when you read that back to me, I go like, oh, God, it kind of sounds like, I don't know, I'm all over the place. What what about that?

[05:51] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, I was looking, what I did was I said I was, I had done a few of these before. And so on the dashboard, it gives you a list of, you know, like who you've had a conversation with and who you're waiting for an email and, and and then up above that, there's a list of possibles. And once you go through that, you can click on, and it'll give you another seven, 10, whatever suggestions that you can review. And so when I reviewed yours, I was curious that you had lived in so many different places, and I was curious about you know, growing up in an immigrant family, you know, I know certain immigrant groups are actually, you know, quite conservative. And, you know, I have some friends that are from Africa and they are very, very evangelical Christians. And so on social things, they're quite conservative, except, of course, you know, matters of race, they are not, you know, So I was just, you know, I was wondering what kind of, you know, growing up in an ethnic neighborhood, how did that shape your values or was that already, has that neighborhood sort of become more Americanized or?

[07:14] MIM SCALIN: Well, it's interesting because I grew up in a Sicilian Italian neighborhood. We are not Sicilian Italians. As a child, I felt very, but we lived there till I was 16 and my older sister was even longer there than I was. But we felt culturally, we felt very comfortable and the Italian food and buying olive oil in gallon containers, not little bottles. It just had a whole thing about.

[07:45] MIM SCALIN: Being in the Sicilian neighborhood. But we were a handful of non-Sicilians. Our family is actually Jewish.

[07:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[07:53] MIM SCALIN: And we didn't grow up in a Jewish milieu and we didn't belong to any kind of a congregation. Religiously, my mother believed in you do things in your home and in your heart and that bricks and mortar were not her thing. So, which was interesting.

[08:11] MIM SCALIN: But growing up as a person, one of the people who were not like.

[08:16] MIM SCALIN: Other people, you had a sense of.

[08:20] MIM SCALIN: Of being different, but at the same time a sense that everybody there felt being different, if they were different. And I think that's one of the reasons my parents moved to that neighborhood, because they couldn't move to a white neighborhood.

[08:34] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[08:35] MIM SCALIN: They were there. And Chicago is very ethnically divided. There was the Polish neighborhood over there, then the German neighborhood. And when they moved from this Italian neighborhood, closer to where I was going to high school. That was a Swedish neighborhood.

[08:49] SPEAKER D: Oh.

[08:52] MIM SCALIN: And we lived in Apartment Villas North Park College, now University, which is a Swedish Lutheran University. And then when I was in college, they moved to another neighborhood that was Greek and German.

[09:04] MIM SCALIN: So this is Chicago, very much a very ethnic city in these little groupings. So that was a very rich way to grow up, I think, the environment.

[09:16] MIM SCALIN: Was just really, very interesting. I did not know Hispanic people, knew very few black people till I got to college. My mother, when she worked, she worked with black people. My dad did also.

[09:29] MIM SCALIN: But there weren't any in the neighborhood because the black people lived in their own separate neighborhoods, as did the Polish people and the Greek people. And also, my parents were very, very strong Democrats. Chicago was a very Democrat city, and.

[09:49] MIM SCALIN: Irish, the Irish Catholic Democratic machine. But they were also, they were very grateful for America. They loved America. My dad would be, he didn't have one, but we lived in an apartment when I was growing up, so he wouldn't have to hang out an American flag anywhere. But he was very, he loved America. He loved this country. My mother did, too. They were very.

[10:14] MIM SCALIN: Very, very grateful for America. And so I grew up with that feeling, too. Very strong feelings about America. And he was very proud that he was an American and very proud that he spoke really good English because he came as a and he learned English when he was eight. And it was one of several languages he knew.

[10:34] MIM SCALIN: And they were working class, blue collar.

[10:37] MIM SCALIN: He worked in factories. His mother got a job at the car factory when I was 14. And that was just who we were.

[10:44] MIM SCALIN: We were sure, hard working, those kind of people. And I grew up also with you be kind to people because you don't know what's going on in their lives. I worked with my mother in department store and I saw how she treated people and she treated people so nicely in my dad too.

[10:59] MIM SCALIN: They.

[11:01] MIM SCALIN: Were very open to people and they believed in kindness. There was this thing my mother would.

[11:09] MIM SCALIN: Say and it was like a poem that she'd put in somewhere. You only come through this place once therefore, you know, whatever, something like that.

[11:16] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[11:16] MIM SCALIN: And so that had a very that's who I am because of them.

[11:21] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay. Do you. I grew up in Cincinnati, which is mostly. Okay.

[11:28] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[11:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so on my dad's side of the family, it's. It's. It's very. His mom's side of the family, my. My. My paternal grandmother, she. Her family had been here for several generations, going back into the 1850s. But my dad's dad, my paternal grandfather.

[11:49] SPEAKER D: Was.

[11:50] CHRIS KRIEGER: The grandson of a guy who came over after 1900. Certain things have happened to Cincinnati, like after World War I or during World War I, three-quarters of the German elementary schools just disappeared. they just because there was so much anti-German sentiment in the war.

[12:16] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[12:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: But at the same time, my grandfather had dropped out of school in the Great Depression, and he could read and write German almost as well as English. And when he was fighting in Germany, he actually used German to talk with, with local residents sometimes.

[12:34] SPEAKER D: Right.

[12:36] MIM SCALIN: It's one of the languages I I wanted to learn, but I don't know how many more languages I can fit into my brain.

[12:44] CHRIS KRIEGER: So that was another thing is how many languages do you speak?

[12:50] MIM SCALIN: I speak French, but it's getting weaker because I don't have too many people to speak with. I speak Spanish fluently. I'm learning Japanese because our son-in-law is Japanese and I want to speak to his parents and he loves when I'm learning. I'm doing that. And I do know some German, but only because I of certain songs and so I do that. But those are the three languages that I have, the four languages that I have with English.

[13:19] CHRIS KRIEGER: Now were you teaching those or?

[13:22] MIM SCALIN: Nope, nope. Studied French when I was young and I spent a lot of time in France so I was able to really learn it from people and assimilate that way. I started learning Spanish when I was in my 60s. because I was teaching at university and they offered a free little class for an hour a week for a semester. It was free to faculty and I went, hey, sounds good to me. And then I just kept going and now I'm, now I'm, you know, we have a book club, we have a social group, we have a, and I just speak Spanish. So I really, I'm really happy about that.

[13:56] CHRIS KRIEGER: You know, as a completely aside question, you know, I'm very pro immigrants. It's part of my family's history. And I mean, I believe we should do it on some sort of rational basis. And, you know, I'm sure we probably have an annual carrying capacity of what we can do, et cetera.

[14:14] SPEAKER D: But.

[14:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: I've noticed, you know, I had, I took Latin and German in high school and then just Latin. But I've noticed that, you know, Latin and the romance languages are very sexed. and it's important because in Spanish too, from my limited understanding of it, my sense is that gender connotates a huge amount of value. And so a lot of, you know, actual just plain objects have a one gender or another. And I've often thought we should just set up free clinics everywhere across the country and libraries are to get people to speak English as fast as possible if they want to because you know one thing many South American countries seem to have a problem with is chauvinism and I'm really concerned about women today. I'm a father of a I have a 22 year old daughter and my mother went back to school and got her doctorate and I can still remember you know, even here, like the, the department's head would say, well, you can, you can figure out the Christmas party because you're a woman. You don't have to do that better. And I thought, you know, what? And so, so, but I am concerned about, you know, if you grow up, I think that's, I think that's the thing is a lot of times we grow up with something that really deeply affects us, but it's so subtle and it's so I'm on the present everywhere that we don't we don't think about it. You know, like if you grew up in a suburb to you a home is a or me would be a single family home. If you grew up in a tribal compound in southern Sudan, your home is a is a thatched hut inside of a fence area.

[16:15] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, mine was an apartment building. I never thought I'd own a home. Now we have a home. I think about here, I know because I do know a lot of people in the Hispanic community, I also know people who are working that area and a lot of friends volunteer as ESL teachers, the Sacred Heart Center and a lot of people I know and they're volunteers to teach English to people. And then I worked as an interpreter in the school to work with parents and teachers during parent-teacher conferences and the dads would speak English, but the moms wouldn't and it would be like, what's going on here? And the moms were stuck at home with the other kids and they never got out much and all they knew.

[16:56] MIM SCALIN: Or they were house cleaners and they worked with another friend who spoke Spanish where the dads were all in the world working and they couldn't go to school at night. Like my grandfather went to school at night to learn English. My grandmother learned because my mother taught her English when she started kindergarten. But And I noticed, and I learned a lot from volunteering in these Hispanic families. They couldn't go at night because they had the families with children and they were, it was difficult. Now, my parents moved to California and they worked, they sold things at a flea market. They sold kids clothes and they met a lot of Hispanic speaking people. And my mother would get upset when the little children would interpret for their parents. and I wondered, I, at first I was put up and I went with her and her husband said, Tell your mother to speak English. Tell your mother to learn English.

[17:49] MIM SCALIN: And I realized it because my mother.

[17:50] MIM SCALIN: Acted as an interpreter for her mom until she taught her mother enough English to learn. But there's such a doctor, I mean, so conscious of being, not of being judgmental because sometimes I have an imaginary t-shirt that says, petty bitchy and judgmental. And it's only imagined I've never made that.

[18:11] MIM SCALIN: But I have to watch myself with that because I don't know people's circumstances. Like why couldn't they go to school to learn English? What is their opportunities to learn English? Because I know my father read the dictionary. He loved English and he was proud of his ability to do that. But his parents, and I didn't know his daddy died before I was born, but his his mother and my maternal.

[18:34] MIM SCALIN: Grandparents spoke accented English.

[18:37] MIM SCALIN: So they came so late, you know.

[18:42] CHRIS KRIEGER: I mean, I've been the only white guy on the bus. I've spent hours to have a, you know, a 45 minute conversation because we were using the, the English other language dictionary and going back and forth, and we were committed to the conversation, even though it was remarkably inconvenient. But that wasn't my take on it. My thing was, from what you've learned of Spanish, do you think that it encourages you to view things with the lens of gender more prominent than in English?

[19:17] MIM SCALIN: I don't notice that because our Spanish social group is mainly women and most of them seem pretty bold. They're from Mexico, Venezuela, oh my gosh, the Venezuelan woman, she's a trip, she's so out there. Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, yeah, those are the main people that are to our group on a regular basis. And they don't seem like people who are under a man's thumb. And they've been here in this country different amounts of time. Yeah, and I also spent some time and we go to down to Mexico. You know, we went down for vacation.

[20:04] MIM SCALIN: Like for three weeks in the same place all the time.

[20:07] SPEAKER D: Sure.

[20:07] MIM SCALIN: But my only interaction there with native peoples were usually, you know, in the grocery stores and shops like that. But it was hard to tell. I mean, I didn't notice like in.

[20:22] MIM SCALIN: Some cultures where you might notice that the men would always talk and dominate, I didn't notice that.

[20:28] MIM SCALIN: So I don't know if I can address, I do understand about gender and people were trying to change that gender thing and it's just because in French too, in French, you know, why is table this and why is it, you know, why are skirts masculine and you know, cancer.

[20:50] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, there's a great book out called Half the Sky, and it's written by a husband wife couple that basically were the, the New York Times Chinese desk. They, they wrote out of Beijing, and they, they were in, they were in China for several years during the 80s when China was really, that was the beginning of their modernization period. and they made several predictions and suggestions. And I read the book in the late 90s, early 2000s, and they were right on the money. And I was so impressed by that, that years later when I saw that book, Half the Sky, I went ahead and got it, and I've seen the documentary, but that's their idea, is they have worked all over the world and covered a wide variety of issues and sometimes even in a combat theater. And they believe that worldwide women are marginalized so much that it affects the development of humans on earth and how we do things, socioeconomically, geopolitically, and so they point out that if we could stop this, things might get a lot better, not just for women, but for everybody because one thing we know from aid, if you give men aid, you give men aid, but if you give women aid, you aid the community. And that's true more than 90% of the time, no matter who's giving what, you know. And so that's pretty powerful. And so then they wrote another book called A Path Appears. And the idea is if a few people start doing, like taking a more, a better path, other people will take that path too, until it becomes quite visible in its own right as another path. And so they didn't just want to backseat drive and point out problems. They also point out several things that you can do from your own home that can make a huge difference.

[23:00] MIM SCALIN: I like that. I like that. I'm a person who likes action. If there's no action I can take, whether it's the Japanese expression shikata ga nai, that's the way it is, or yes, what way it works out of that, that's all you can't, it's kind of got a lot of meanings, but it means like if you can't do anything about it, let it go in some ways. So if there's something, if I keep seeing things like my family sends me.

[23:23] MIM SCALIN: Different kinds of things going on in the world, I can't see a way to take action, then I feel like I can't do anything about it. I have to let it go focus on something else.

[23:34] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure. You know, one thing I was surprised was they noted if you, if we eye-dye salt for the whole world, we can pick the IQ up 10 to 10 to 15 points very, very quickly. Very quickly. And so I had no idea that iodine was that important in our brain's chemistry.

[23:58] SPEAKER D: But.

[24:00] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, that was, that's, well, so when you were in France, was that when you were studying the piano?

[24:10] MIM SCALIN: No, no, my husband had the opportunity because he was full-time faculty and he had the opportunity to go to A residency, our university was in a consortium of universities that owned a studio in an artist residency in Paris, right on the Seine. Right in view of Notre Dame. And we were able to go and spend three months at a time, two, three months at a time there. Usually we'd go for two months. And we started early in the summer is when somebody couldn't go for the whole time and we'd say, well, we'll go. And we brought our children when they were young. Twice we had our children there and it really had a big effect on them in terms of They were in a place that was very old compared to the United States. And meeting people from other places in the world, there were people there, Iran owned four studios because at the time the Shah's wife loved Paris and they bought four studios and people still were coming to this even during current times of the revolutionary situation.

[25:08] MIM SCALIN: So we met Iranians. That's another thing I want to learn for.

[25:12] SPEAKER D: See? Right.

[25:15] MIM SCALIN: But we met people from, you know, places you normally don't meet people from here, like, you know, Uzbekistan and those kind of places. So that's where I was learning French and French better. And it was a wonderful experience. We did that very often during the mid-2000s when my husband and I were retired from teaching. And so we were able to do it more. that was, that was, it's very, very wonderful. Just a broad experience of meeting different people.

[25:46] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sounds great. Well, so how'd you end up from New York and France and now you're in Richmond, Virginia, right?

[25:54] MIM SCALIN: My husband got a job. We were both from Chicago. He got, he was working and then he decided he didn't, he was tired of working. He was working advertising in Chicago and he wasn't doing him any good and he was drinking too much.

[26:09] MIM SCALIN: Cocktail lunches and whatever.

[26:11] SPEAKER D: Okay.

[26:11] MIM SCALIN: I decided to go to graduate school.

[26:13] MIM SCALIN: And his little, you know, after working.

[26:16] MIM SCALIN: A couple of three years and I'd known him for a very long time. We've met when we were freshmen in college and I just followed him to New York and we ended up getting married and I taught school.

[26:26] MIM SCALIN: I I work for TWA. I did a lot of things.

[26:30] MIM SCALIN: I work for an airline.

[26:32] MIM SCALIN: I got out of school with an art degree and I can do an uh huh.

[26:35] MIM SCALIN: So I got a job with TWI and then I got transferred. I did reservations. I got transferred to New York and was able to be with him. And then, and then I, the city of New York needed school teachers and if you had a bachelor's degree they.

[26:49] MIM SCALIN: Would, you could apply and if you got in they sent you to NYU Graduate School of Education for free.

[26:55] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, wow.

[26:57] MIM SCALIN: Here I am and I got chosen and so I taught public school, PS 396 in Brooklyn. And then when my husband was done, he didn't know what he was going to do. He thought he'd go back and go back to advertising in Chicago. And a friend said, hey, I'm going down to teach at this university. You should apply. They're expanding their art department and they're bringing in people from other places. So he came down, he got the.

[27:20] MIM SCALIN: Job, and this is really came at a very, very unpleasant time in his life.

[27:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[27:26] MIM SCALIN: It was 1968. Besides the world falling apart, Martin Luther King had gotten killed and JFK and all that stuff, it was massive resistance to segregation, to integration here. And we little know-nothing little northern people.

[27:41] MIM SCALIN: Where there was racism anyway, but we didn't have this kind of, you know, literal signs, white zone, black something. And so it was a very, very strange time.

[27:51] MIM SCALIN: I couldn't get a job because I.

[27:52] MIM SCALIN: Was from New York.

[27:53] SPEAKER D: So I did.

[27:54] MIM SCALIN: That's why I did different things in my life.

[27:55] SPEAKER D: And.

[27:56] MIM SCALIN: And because, no, I studied piano as a child. And until I was 18, I was gonna be a piano teacher, but, like, pointed me in different directions. But I think because of. I don't know why, but I think I was always open to doing whatever. It's not like I wasn't a person.

[28:10] MIM SCALIN: Who had a goal saying, maybe because I have an art degree, that's why I started with an art degree where nobody, you know, who's gonna fire? Who's gonna say, yeah, I'm looking for. fine art painter. So you know you just have to work. You get jobs. And I think that just made it possible for me to do anything. Okay, well, I'll just do that.

[28:31] SPEAKER D: Whatever.

[28:32] MIM SCALIN: Sure. What about you? What kind of work did you do? Or are you doing?

[28:37] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, right now I do remodeling and I'm self-employed and I like the scheduling leeway it gives me so I can be there for my dad more. And he's not really good at planning things, so, and he's not a very good patient, so, so things pop up and he's doing better now. But, but I've done all kinds of stuff. I've been an ag research assistant. I've driven a truck on grain harvest and, but, but for years, what I did was I, I ran a trip, a forest service trail crew to during the spring and summer. And then every late summer or early fall, I ran a pack mule string in the biggest wilderness area in the lower 48 states. And sometimes I worked for, I worked a season for Glacier National Park. I was a packer up near the Canadian border at their northernmost ranger station. I've worked on ranches. I've been a frame carpenter and a roofer and a painter. I've been a short order cook, a dishwasher actually. So I have a degree in history. I skipped a couple grades in high school. I'm a very nerdy guy. Usually feel like I don't fit in. And I so when I got out of high school before I even had my driver's license, College was very awkward. I dropped out, I partied and busted my butt working. So I was going to get kicked out of the house. I joined the army. The army gave me a chance to get some experience and get some more self-confidence and I came back fiercely determined to become a history professor. Really wanted to be a nice nerdy guy and study things I think are important and but a cool summer job. introduced me to the mountains. I planted trees, but I drove a grain truck. So I had a couple weeks off to go backpacking in Colorado where our harvest ended.

[30:46] SPEAKER D: And.

[30:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: I did nine days in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness area near Steamboat Springs, which is west of Denver. And it just changed my life. I just, I love being in the mountains and lots of things went wrong on that trip, but I was able to get through them and still have a good time in spite of the discomfort. And that's when I started the Forest Service bit. But, you know, I I ended up coming down here and meeting my daughter's mother. And just when I was thinking, maybe this is not good and I need to go back home, which to me is the mountains, because I used to live 50 miles from a grocery store in Northern Idaho. And that's when I was home. And so, but then we got, we, our, our daughter was, was on the way. We learned she was on the way. And so I stayed around to be a, a dad and a husband and then a single dad. And now I'm, now I'm here to, to be a son until my dad doesn't need me anymore. And then and I will probably leave here. I don't, I'm not sure where I'll go. I can't afford to go to the Northwest. I'm very uncomfortable with some of the negative zeitgeist that's so present here in Oklahoma and in Montana or Idaho, where I would, they've changed a lot in the years I've been gone. You know, Idaho has done some things politically. I'm just appalled by it and. I frankly do not like living in a buckle of the Bible belt like Oklahoma is. I'm so, you know, the state is so proud to proclaim its Christian identity. But as a state, it has some of the most appalling practices and beliefs. And in one-on-one, Oklahomans are some of the nicest people you can ever meet. I've road tripped all over this country. I've lived out of saddlebags and backpacks and pickup beds. But, you know, you know, we have a race massacre and for years they called it a race riot if they even, you know, just all kinds of stuff. And it, you know, I have my own very strong spiritual beliefs, but they don't fit into fundamental, even jealousism. And so that really affects everything I do in a small town. It probably affects about 30% of my my net take home is reduced from that from that. I don't go to the right church. And sometimes I speak out when there are when I think there are things that are bad. You know, I think women, I think if men could get pregnant, the right to choose would be a constitutional right. Just period. I don't care about the the morality. I don't care about the ethics. I've seen my mom when she had lupus and was sick for decades. I've seen my dad when he's sick. So I know. But you know, if you try and advocate for that, there's a very real social cost to that in small town America.

[34:07] MIM SCALIN: I'm sure. This is the smallest city I've ever lived in. But I'm sure. And also we do I do have evangelicals in my family. And it's really been hard to speak with them. And yeah, and so I just kind of have to hold back because I don't want to lose them. I don't, I don't believe in a thing where people cut off their family members because of holding those beliefs, because.

[34:30] MIM SCALIN: I still want to love them and care about them.

[34:32] MIM SCALIN: So that's been, that's been hard. But, but this is the smallest city I've lived in, and it's quite a conservative city. And, you know, this Capital of the Confederacy. But it's very interesting because I have become interested in history. I've been reading a lot of David McCullough and one of my book clubs we read nonfiction and we read a lot of we're enjoying reading a lot of history. Mainly we've read a lot of David McCullough which has been interesting. We've taken a liking to his way of writing history and living here where our children were learning a history very.

[35:08] MIM SCALIN: Different from the history I learned in Illinois.

[35:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: Which was, I imagine.

[35:15] MIM SCALIN: And I feel like I've been part of history because I've been here with the taking down of all those large, very large, Confederate sculptures that went up at the turn of the last century that were, and I live close to the Avenue that they were on, and our kids would go over there and play around, and they'd always, they'd be joking about how they were big statues of losers and Right. But they were, you know, I was learning the history of this place through them and it was very different, very, you know, than what I learned. So, Land of Lincoln.

[35:50] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right. That's, well, I've noticed that here too, and I've noticed in Western states, you know, Western states economies are so much more based on extractive industries like mining, oil, logging and that sort of thing. And a lot of those things are very much influenced or controlled by one government agency or another. The Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, yada, yada, yada, Department of Defense. And there are some EPA huge sites because they I used to just dump a uranium all over the Navajo reservation. But it seems like the more the federal government is involved, the more the popular dynamic is very anti federal government.

[36:46] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[36:47] CHRIS KRIEGER: And it seems to grow much stronger. And I think it's because the government agencies have a much greater effect because it's a it's not as diverse of an economy. And, and, and, you know, so it's so prone to this boom bust thing that a lot of people get hurt in those Cycles and they, they never forget it. And it causes a certain amount of popular resistance.

[37:14] MIM SCALIN: Sure.

[37:15] CHRIS KRIEGER: But now we're coming into some challenges with the world and with Global climate change and stuff that you know, one-on-one approaches are simply not going to work. You know, we, you know, the oceans are flooding New York subways. The, the Department of Defense has got to spend billions for its bases all over the world. You know, we need to harden up our infrastructure and expand it, and we need to do something with mass transit and.

[37:47] MIM SCALIN: Oh, gosh, yeah.

[37:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Tons. We need tons more. And we probably need to get out of this instant gratification and, you know, and set up some sort of network of, of railroad storage stuff so we can move stuff around and have some resiliency during all the, we're going to have successive waves of natural disasters, you know, whether it's a drought or fire or.

[38:12] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I just, I I look at, well, I was looking at a map, a map of the United States with my granddaughter today. She's 12. And I always love maps and I always loved knowing where things were. And of course, then working for an airline and knowing where all these countries and she knew, she, I looked at.

[38:29] MIM SCALIN: I had this map without any names on the states. And I said, do you know any of these states? Can you pick out one of these states? She said, well, I don't know. I said, what's this one right here? Oh, that big one, that's Texas. California. And I said, what's I don't this one know, here?

[38:43] SPEAKER D: Is And that I Pennsylvania?

[38:43] MIM SCALIN: Was like, Can you find Virginia?

[38:46] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, it's like a triangle. Yeah, I know where Virginia is. But I'm like, oh my God, she's 12 years old. She's going to seventh grade. Hello, help. She doesn't know what, and we have such a huge country. We're so diverse. My European friends, they love America, by the way.

[39:02] MIM SCALIN: My friends, my European friends, oh my God, they love America. I just had a visitor, a Spain young man from was here and visited for a day and a half and he just travels, was traveling all over the country and stuff. Loves America, loves the country, loves the diversity. He went, he from here, he went to Wyoming to wherever was one of the national parks to hike.

[39:23] MIM SCALIN: And then he went, and he just, he just loves it. And he, and I realized because of those people that are our country is.

[39:33] MIM SCALIN: Just so big and so interesting and so different from all these just little bitty countries. And we're so diverse and yet we've got to somehow pull it together and it's mind-boggling.

[39:44] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, and you're right about the environment. And since you're a person who loves the outdoors, I'm not very outdoorsy. I grew up in, you know, cement and a apartment building, but I really, really appreciate, you know, how who cannot appreciate nature. And then I was reading about the the mule, the mule mail service that goes down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I was just reading about that last week. They go down there and they get their mail. And it's like, and then my mail carrier said, we have to support the United States Postal Service because if it privatizes, they won't get their mail at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I'm going, no. Oh, it's just, yeah, yeah, it's just, and I agree, there's a lot that needs to be done.

[40:25] SPEAKER D: And I don't know.

[40:26] CHRIS KRIEGER: You know, the thing is there. I don't understand. I just. I don't decide anything. I've never voted a party ticket in my life. If it. If I support equal opportunity, equal responsibility and sustainability. And, you know, anything else is. It's ethical, it's moral. It's very practical. It's actually pretty, you know, to be sustainable in the long run is very self serving actually, if you want to look at it. I mean, if I don't let somebody pollute my land, then my land will still be worth something in 20 years. You know, I have friends that have sold their pipe, the right away for pipelines. And now they can't do anything with huge portions of their land because it's, I think it's 150 feet from either side of the line. They can't, and it may be less. And it probably depends on the size of the pipeline and what's in it. But it's, it's crazy. What, what some people do for short term.

[41:36] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[41:37] CHRIS KRIEGER: And, and so, you know, I don't, I think Milton Friedman should be, should be banned. I think we should. Make him realize, you know, we need to say his ideas don't work for anybody but really wealthy people that are already wealthy. You know, neoliberal laissez-faire capitalism sucks in this idea that no rules, you know, no rules doesn't work for a kindergarten classroom. Why would you ever think it would work for an international economy? and he's been so fond of using natural disasters to co-opt public institutions like Louisiana's public education system when Katrina came. I don't know, and people talk about him here in business college, like he's a saint or something. You have to be His ideas don't work. Republican presidents are responsible for the biggest annual deficits. Bush Jr, Shrubb and Chump have the most. The only highest per median income, per household income was when Clinton was president. If you adjust for cost of living, and Obama got stuck with a nightmare, he paid off half the deficit, you know, and increased the number of jobs and he still deported 14,000 people a year or something. I mean, I just, I don't, I'm disgusted by the automatic hatred of, I think Obama, he didn't do everything I wanted, but he was a gentleman. I mean, it was so nice to have a statesman of some quality and intelligence. Instead, we get this buffoon who, you know, his idea of an extensive vocabulary is to put very or very, very in front of any of the few modifiers he knows. I mean, so what? I don't. He knows dumb, he knows stupid, he knows good. It's very, very good, you know, and that's.

[43:53] MIM SCALIN: Just hearing you say those words, I follow a guy on inside. The only social media I have is. Instagram because I like to put up these postcards that I write and I put up like a pretty flower and I'll say, look at this lovely flower. It's so gorgeous. Or look at this park scene or look at this waterfall or whatever. And then I put up and you can write postcards to voters. I kind of do this juxtaposition. I, and I use that as a platform. But there's this guy named Marty and he's a musician, older guy, and he reads Trump's words and he just says, I have words for you. And he just reads verbatim what he has said. And you look at it and I I'm just go, laughing, I but at the same time, I'm going, oh my God, this is the president.

[44:36] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, 40 out of 44 of his top advisors from his first term refused to endorse him for his second term. And I heard they had to take a, he doesn't like to read anything. So, you know, most presidents have a huge long intelligence report.

[44:58] MIM SCALIN: I feel like a stage manager again. I'm giving five to the actors.

[45:03] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, and we can go over it won't shut us off if we want to. But so it's just like they had to dummy down the world intelligence report. You know, presidents that get that usually spend 30 minutes to three hours a day on that. and it can be 10, 20, 30 pages long with all kinds of references to other documents and he wants it in less than two typewritten pages.

[45:33] MIM SCALIN: And I can see that your history, your interest in history, your background and your wanting to be a history teacher, I see that is definitely colored how your all of your ability to see all these different things to me as, you know, for me, I'm new to reading history because I never cared about history, but Yeah, I can see how that.

[45:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I went for a master's in geography and I did everything but finish writing and defend my thesis. I timed out. And so it's funny, I still help some of my friends who have graduated with their doctorates. I help them edit their articles and papers. But I focused on using mixed methods qualitative and quantitative to study socioeconomic and cultural problems, environmental issues, especially maybe how they're linked to government agencies and local economies or economies of all scales. And so that I can also see.

[46:38] MIM SCALIN: How troubling these things would be for you, too, because you have a vast store of knowledge about them and that they, that they're right there and that they could be quite troubling to you.

[46:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: I really think it's, we're looking at Mad Max beyond Thunderdome. It's gonna be terrible.

[46:54] MIM SCALIN: I saw that reference.

[46:55] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[46:56] CHRIS KRIEGER: I think our grandchildren, I really do believe we'll deserve every, every curse.

[47:04] SPEAKER D: Yeah. And.

[47:08] MIM SCALIN: I think I hope that with with our, our, we have only one and that's all we'll ever have. And that she's really smart and she's really aware of a lot of things. And I do feel for her with what she's inheriting.

[47:23] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[47:24] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[47:25] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, there's only been a few astronauts, but it seems like when they come back, if they're allowed to really speak their minds, they don't seem to have nearly as much patience with International rivalry because they don't see those.

[47:40] MIM SCALIN: Little lines on the map. And I always, I read a lot of science fiction, too.

[47:45] MIM SCALIN: Oh, okay.

[47:47] MIM SCALIN: I started reading when I was 14 years old and they had to cover the book with brown paper because I was a girl and girls were not reading science fiction.

[47:54] CHRIS KRIEGER: Oh, yeah.

[47:55] MIM SCALIN: Yeah. Covering up. But I do. My son and I are reading a lot of science fiction, and it's been real, real interesting. We're all over the place and I can't even remember anything because I read too much.

[48:07] SPEAKER D: But.

[48:09] MIM SCALIN: I don't know where I was going with that, but I just hope.

[48:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: That I'm... We're going into post-apocalyptic science fiction. Was that where you were going with it?

[48:19] MIM SCALIN: We read a lot of dystopian stuff. Yeah, now I cannot. I'm having trouble with the dystopian.

[48:28] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right.

[48:30] MIM SCALIN: I'm reading an article right now in the Atlantic on Kurt Vonnegut and the bomb. And I don't know why I started getting the Atlantic, because I can't do it anymore. There's too many articles. The Prince is too tiny, I'm too old. But this very good article about, and I remembered he survived the bombing of Dresden. And yeah, and so I've just been.

[48:54] MIM SCALIN: Reading that over the past few days, and that's been very difficult to see how we have destroyed people thinking that that was expedient. And a friend, a friend from high school, she's not the one I lost most recently, but she moved here to be close to me from the tri-states in the southeastern part of Washington state. She worked for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

[49:17] MIM SCALIN: Plutonium triggers, and she became ill. And I'm sure there was a cluster of illnesses that the CDC knew about and nobody was was dealing with because they're still cleaning up there, I think. And she, she died. She had Parkinson's and a bunch of things. And I would think a lot about that bomb. And growing up, I did hear about Los Alamos, and I did hear about the Manhattan Project. And, yeah.

[49:41] MIM SCALIN: And I was in Japan last year, and I just felt like how can those people even like us? How can they even talk to us? How can they treat us so respectfully and nicely?

[49:50] MIM SCALIN: We we did that. And we did Dresden. And I think about how, you know, how we have done so many things as a country that have been really ugly. And I don't know if we face up to them from some enslavement to.

[50:08] MIM SCALIN: Native American, Native peoples and then the kinds of destruction in war that we've, I don't know.

[50:16] MIM SCALIN: That, that gets me.

[50:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: But, you know, I have, I have friends from the Middle East and, you know, they, they point out that, and, of course, they don't talk like this with everyone, but they point out, you know, Iran hasn't invaded anybody but, but one country, you know, in, in a few decades. And how many has America invaded in the past? And I think right now we have at least a thousand special operative people in Africa and and we've overthrown 40 governments, I think, in South and Central America.

[50:48] MIM SCALIN: Central America. Yeah, I was thinking about Central America because my friends from Nicaragua and, and Santa Barbara and, yeah, it's, like, been interesting, hasn't it? Oh, gosh, I don't know. I, I don't. I recently. Well, my plumber was here today, and we, we always have a nice conversation. He's a black man in his early 60s, and we always end up. And I always thank him for having these conversations with me because I look like this.

[51:12] MIM SCALIN: But he said, you know, he's not so unhelpful. And I had a bone density test of a technician who was a black woman, maybe in her 50s or so. And again, she was not so, she was not as negative as I was.

[51:27] MIM SCALIN: I know I've got my negativity. And she didn't do God talk. She didn't say, oh, God's gonna save us or do any of that kind of stuff. She said, we've had some really terrible things happen. We've had things where it's seems like the world was the way America was was coming like 1968, coming apart. And especially, you know, for black people.

[51:44] MIM SCALIN: I imagine what that was like. I said, but, yeah, we've had these moments where then something comes together and we set it right. So even if it's just for a short period, he said, I think this.

[51:53] MIM SCALIN: Will be that way.

[51:54] MIM SCALIN: It will stop.

[51:54] SPEAKER D: It will end.

[51:55] MIM SCALIN: Because speaking of, you know, the pedophile White House, he's stupid. Nobody likes David Vance anyway. Nobody's gonna follow him. And eventually, and. things will get right. And if black people can feel that way, I go, no.

[52:10] SPEAKER D: Right.

[52:12] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, maybe that's encouraging. I'm curious. Do they identify more features that give them hope besides just they think things will get better or they feel first.

[52:24] MIM SCALIN: Of all, they feel like women are and are really coming forward to do more things.

[52:31] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[52:31] MIM SCALIN: And they also feel that people are taking to the streets in support of the things that are positive, that they're coming out and they're, and they're, and they're seeing the crowds of people as we are here in Richmond, young, old, black, white, Asian, whatever. And it's just been real interesting. And, and the woman here in particular, the, my plumber is a, a Navy vet, and he's seen, when he goes for reunions, he said he's seen the difference in the veterans. to that there's more Hispanic veterans. So they're seeing those kinds of changes and gosh, if they can feel a little tiny bit of hope, I'm like.

[53:08] SPEAKER D: You know.

[53:11] CHRIS KRIEGER: I hope and pray. I mean, you know, there is some cause. I've really been heartened to see more women in politics and there's a private or it's a non-profit group and.

[53:26] SPEAKER D: I.

[53:26] CHRIS KRIEGER: Forget their name, but their idea is the federal government has been so corrupted by the election campaign donation system that what they, they advocate is they, well, they point out first, they, there's a YouTube video. Just if you Google Jennifer Lawrence, three line, three line video, okay? And the three lines is they, a whole bunch of politicians or academic political scientists graphed, they studied American federal legislation, and they found out that regardless of popular support, legislation had a 30% chance of becoming law, whether it had 10% of the country for it or 90% of the country for it, which is not very democratic, if you think about it. And so what they said was they gave up on trying to go just through the federal government to fix it right now. They said we need to organize at the grassroots and move up the pyramid from there. I like that.

[54:35] MIM SCALIN: I look for that.

[54:37] CHRIS KRIEGER: The other thing too is there's an Iowa elementary school teacher and she did this thing about racism called white eye or blue eyes, brown eyes.

[54:48] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, she, yeah, I think I was.

[54:51] CHRIS KRIEGER: Do that every, I think they should do it in school. I think they should repeat it in high school. I think they should do it in the military. I think they should do it in jobs. It is so, I've watched her when they, when she retired and would go to college campuses.

[55:06] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[55:07] MIM SCALIN: And who would be black? Who's willing to be a black person? That one where she asks people and nobody raises their hand.

[55:13] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[55:14] MIM SCALIN: I love her. Is her name like Jane something or other? I don't know.

[55:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, it is Jane. I think so.

[55:19] MIM SCALIN: Something, yeah. When she does that, every time I see that, where she asks people in the audience, who would, yeah. You know how you'll get treated. Yeah, I just.

[55:28] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, have you ever, that's one thing I get to people like here. and, you know, they say racism isn't systemic. And I, and I, I have older friends that are, you know, American Indians, and they talk about, they're really about 10 years older than me, and I'm 59. So, but they talk about when they were going to the, like, from their small town to Oklahoma City or to Tulsa, they could stop in small convenience stores along the way and buy gas. or candy or beer, but they weren't allowed to use the public restrooms. So if a bunch of Pawnee Indians or Otoe Indians were driving to the city, they had to bring their own washcloths and paper towels or toilet paper. And I know people from several different tribes, well, not several, but like four or five different tribes. And so I just asked my friends that say, you know, we passed the civil rights laws and that was enough. I say, if you could pick any color for your kid to be born, what color would you pick? And they all say, you know, nobody says black. And I said, well, that tells you right there. Right there.

[56:42] SPEAKER D: Right.

[56:45] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, I hear you. And I just, it makes me, it makes me very, yeah, it's very sad. I look at my own family. We have Asian people in my family. There are no black people. people in my family. I thought my child, one of my children, we grew up in the cities, their schools were pretty black. And I thought, you know, that then they went off to colleges where there weren't as many black people. But I thought that would happen. But my, there's Asian people. We have my, my son-in-law's Japanese. My cousin's married to a Japanese one for many, many, many years.

[57:12] MIM SCALIN: One of her kids is married to Korean. My cousin's married to Chinese guy. So it's interesting that our family has.

[57:21] MIM SCALIN: To Asian people into our family, which also made me very aware of racism against Asian people.

[57:27] CHRIS KRIEGER: Right, right.

[57:28] MIM SCALIN: Needless to say, it's like every. It's just.

[57:32] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[57:33] MIM SCALIN: So who knows what's gonna. Well, you know, I love the fact that you're a history person. I love the fact that you love nature. I wish I would have more opportunity to be out in nature. I love hearing about.

[57:45] MIM SCALIN: I have a friend who goes out and does the forest bathing thing and she picks people who's registered or certified. She's in Indiana and she's registered to take people out into... Sure. I don't know.

[57:58] MIM SCALIN: We're in Indiana because as far as I, what I've seen of Indiana, the parts I've seen are not so wildernessy.

[58:07] CHRIS KRIEGER: The southern parts along the Ohio River are beautiful.

[58:11] MIM SCALIN: Well, maybe that's where she takes them, because certainly that northern part of Indiana, close to Chicago, but I, I wish that I'd had more opportunity. My father was a fisherman. He loved fishing. We'd go up to Wisconsin or northern Minnesota, but we didn't live there. But we go up with kids and fish. So we had that. We had that experience, and we love that and being out there. But, and I love that. I like the fact that you've done those kinds of things and yet you've got this history outlook that's to me, I'm listening to do that. I see how it informs so much.

[58:45] MIM SCALIN: Of what you care about.

[58:47] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, that's thank you. I mean, it's, I do love my country. I just wish I wasn't so ashamed of us right now.

[58:57] MIM SCALIN: We are on the same page with that. I'm like, oh, and you know what? A friend of mine in England, his son is married and he came, he immigrated to America. And I'm like, wow, that's wonderful. I mean, I'm all excited.

[59:11] MIM SCALIN: I wanted to go to the July 4th naturalization or citizenship thing at our history museum, which is nearby. And I didn't get a chance to do that because I want to say thank you to all your people. Thank you for trusting that this country will be nice to you.

[59:26] SPEAKER D: Yeah. Yeah.

[59:30] MIM SCALIN: Yeah.

[59:31] SPEAKER D: So.

[59:33] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sometimes I just wonder, you know, is this like a bad dream? Is this a bad acid trip or.

[59:39] MIM SCALIN: I also, I'm going to tell you the other thing about my. I read a lot of. I read a lot of non-fiction I read a lot of fiction, science and whatever. But lately I've been reading a lot of detective novels where the bad people get caught and punished.

[59:52] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[59:53] MIM SCALIN: And that's been my go-to because I'm lacking a lot of Justice in my.

[59:58] CHRIS KRIEGER: Do you like Sanford or Elmer Leonard or what kind of detective?

[01:00:02] MIM SCALIN: Oh yeah, and I also just finished the Carl Hiassen book, Red Bad Monkey. That was the TV show. I didn't finish it, so I read it and it's so much better in the book. It's just so complicated. But just give me any old detective story, any, yeah, just foreign ones, American ones, British ones, and I'll just I love it when they catch the bad people and punish them.

[01:00:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: That's good. Yeah, that's, I like that. Our reading has a lot of overlap. I have a lot of Hyacinth and stuff. But also, I find I have a lot of, I call it, it's the book version of Chick Flicks.

[01:00:45] MIM SCALIN: Oh, yeah.

[01:00:46] CHRIS KRIEGER: But I, you know, like I have several issues of several episodes of Call the Midwife. And I liked, I have the book by the first book, you know, by they kicked off the whole series and, you know, I have several Fanny Flag and Lee Smith novels and, oh yeah, all of them.

[01:01:05] MIM SCALIN: I love everything. And I also, my husband and I will watch Midsummer Murders.

[01:01:10] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, you know, I have friends that make fun of me, and I just, I can still go out and change oil, you know, I can have a little tear up and then I, but I can go out and finish dressing out a deer. I can, you know.

[01:01:25] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:01:27] CHRIS KRIEGER: I don't feel any, you know, less masculine or manly, but I, I noticed it seems, it seems to make a, a certain group, a certain age, I'm not sure. Seems to make some people doubt that, and I just, whatever, you know.

[01:01:45] MIM SCALIN: My son is 53. God, he turns 53. Yeah, he's 53. And it's just, yeah, he's kind of an interesting guy, too, with a lot of different capabilities and the things that.

[01:01:58] MIM SCALIN: He can fix things and do whatever.

[01:01:59] SPEAKER D: And.

[01:02:00] MIM SCALIN: But he's an artist and makes his living. He was doing graphic design and does art and just.

[01:02:06] MIM SCALIN: He's all tatted up and he. He got tats on his knuckles because he didn't want to ever work for a corporation. And now he gets hired by corporations to speak about, you know, how to get most for their, you know, bang for their buck from their employees by teaching them creativity and how to be creative problem solvers, basically creative pop. But there he is with his eaching on his knuckles, which he did so he wouldn't, you know, whatever. Cool. It's so interesting. Life is interesting. It's been really a pleasure. Chris, to speak with you. I did want to ask, how old is your father?

[01:02:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: He's 82.

[01:02:41] MIM SCALIN: And he has issues.

[01:02:43] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, he had a quintuple bypass, but he's not quite diabetic, but the doctor who actually did the quintuple bypass, which was a few years back, they actually thought he was diabetic, so they told us he will not get another bypass. The quality of the blood vessel tissue, will not sustain that probably. So, and he's starting to get, you know, some sundowners and neurology.

[01:03:12] MIM SCALIN: My husband is, his short-term memory is for shit, and he's got some cognitive issues and it's really hard to get any kind, we're waiting on a gerontology appointment for it. It's coming in mid-October. So that's the been interesting.

[01:03:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: Now, is you said he's coming into that sober?

[01:03:33] MIM SCALIN: Oh, so he's sober. My husband is absolutely sober, but he's starting to have the memory issues.

[01:03:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, right, right.

[01:03:40] MIM SCALIN: Okay.

[01:03:41] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:03:42] MIM SCALIN: So it's like, it's been interesting. I wondered about, you know, your father.

[01:03:47] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, we know that my father is probably somewhere a little bit on the Asperger spectrum. You know, I'm, I have ADHD and. but he's not, you know, he's not going to go get help for that. He doesn't like to believe in that sort of thing. And so he's not the most user friendly guy in the world, but he's a very good person.

[01:04:08] MIM SCALIN: That's good.

[01:04:10] CHRIS KRIEGER: So, and he's very consistent, even in the ways that he annoys people. He's consistent.

[01:04:17] SPEAKER D: So.

[01:04:19] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, not all the rest of the family. Can handle him I suppose sometimes and so I My daughter and her husband Check on him a couple times a week and and I do My sister didn't but now she's starting to since we've had this last scare and that's that helps out a little bit, you.

[01:04:42] MIM SCALIN: Know, so that's nice because it's hard to be a caretaker well, and I.

[01:04:49] CHRIS KRIEGER: Would like, I don't necessarily want to make up his mind for him, but I would like, I would like us to deal with some issues that we haven't yet. And I'll do whatever he wants, but I need to know what that is. And I pointed out to him, I said, now that my sister and I are finally communing a little bit for the first time in a very long.

[01:05:10] SPEAKER D: Time.

[01:05:12] CHRIS KRIEGER: We the less we have to decide for him, the better chance we have of having some kind of relationship when he's gone.

[01:05:23] SPEAKER D: Right.

[01:05:24] MIM SCALIN: We have, I kind of forced the whole issue here, and we got our wills redone and our powers of attorney and all of those things.

[01:05:33] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:05:33] MIM SCALIN: And I sent packets to each of our children to let them know what things we want and how we want things to be. we have a house full of shit. Yeah, it's nice shit, you know, it's the connection. I'm in my studio and I can't see it, but I mean, there's so much stuff here.

[01:05:51] MIM SCALIN: It's like, sure, paper.

[01:05:52] MIM SCALIN: I'm like, maybe I should start throwing this paper. But that's the only thing that we have to do. But I'm trying, I'm thinking ahead to that too, with our children, because my daughter's gonna be 49 and our son is 53. And I think about, I don't want.

[01:06:08] MIM SCALIN: Them burdened with with so much stuff.

[01:06:10] MIM SCALIN: That they should know what so that they can just step right in and do that. And our recent loss was, and it's really sad to us, a really, really, really close friend diagnosed the end of February with pancreatic cancer. Seven weeks later, he was dead. And it has really, he was just so super, super, and we're trying to be close, I mean, help his widow as much as we can. who happens to be Persian woman and we love her dearly. And it's just been so painful because.

[01:06:43] MIM SCALIN: It was so fast and nobody had.

[01:06:45] MIM SCALIN: Time to really, and I catch my.

[01:06:47] MIM SCALIN: Breath sometimes thinking about.

[01:06:51] MIM SCALIN: How fast it happened. And it just makes us all say we love you more often to all of our, not just our children, we have nieces, and nephews and every time I talk to them and say, I love you, you know, and we've said start to say that to our friends, too.

[01:07:06] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure. That's, I think it's important, you know, and, you know, I tell my dad that every night and now he does this weird thing. He wants me to, I live, I live out in the country about 10 miles away. And so now when I get home, he wants me to text him. I think, you know, Dan, I've been all over, I've been at the South hole. I've been on a ranch in New Zealand, you know, but I just go ahead and do it. I text him, I'm home safely. God bless you. Good night. I love you.

[01:07:38] MIM SCALIN: That's adorable though that he wants let me know your homes. I know, I know that kind of, oh my gosh. I know, I hear you because I have to hold myself back because our kids have traveled a lot for their business. They've been to Egypt, they've been to to Brazil, they've been to Ireland, they've been all over, but I have to hold back from saying, let me know when you're back.

[01:07:59] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, you know, it's funny, I was never the fun parent. And I always, you know, my daughter did, you know, we do, she had the after school program, so I picked her up. So when we got home, it was, you know, chores and homework. And then I always turned off the screen. We don't have that on during dinner. You know, we We say a quick non-denominational blessing. I wanted to keep it fun and light, but that's when you actually talk is when you're sitting at the table. There's nothing else to do. And, and, you know, but I, and I would have given her a lot more freedom. You know, I would have let her start driving a car out in the country early.

[01:08:41] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:08:41] CHRIS KRIEGER: And, and, but I was strict about some of that stuff and, and. but, you know, I, I also tried to get her on her HPV. I tried to do have Frank talks about things that she hit, you know, puberty, that it's important for a girl to know because her mom didn't want to. And I didn't want her to be scared or questioning or think that we're not going to love her because she does something that evangelicals don't like and, and but then when her, not long after she moved in with her mom, her mom married a minister. And see her mom let her not go to school a lot. And she actually qualified. She could have been kicked out of school the last three years she lived in, in this town where, where we were living, just for non-attendance for unexcused absence. But her Her stepdad loved my mom. And he told her when they moved to his town, when he married my ex-wife, and said, She will be going to school. And she did.

[01:09:52] MIM SCALIN: Good, good.

[01:09:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so, you know, he kind of turned her around there. But I have noticed when she moved here after high school, she stayed in a town about two hours away for a while, but she was lonely here. She started going to church on her own and met her husband there. And, and now I see certain values, you know, about Community.

[01:10:20] MIM SCALIN: Community.

[01:10:21] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:10:22] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so now, you know, I'm, I don't qualify. I don't believe the same things she does. And so I'm, I'm on the ouch now, and it, it. that kind of bothers me, you know, I. But she's gonna do what she's gonna do, regardless of what I say, so.

[01:10:39] MIM SCALIN: But that, that's definitely what people to using churches to find Community, if people can't find them in other ways. Yeah, I understand that.

[01:10:50] CHRIS KRIEGER: So I'm happy that she has a spiritual program, and I I do see her get good out of it. I just, it comes with so many other strings and to me that's always been very problematic. You know, when we first moved here, I really, I remember as a teenager I really tried a lot of different denominations and you know, after two or three invitations I would stop. I would decide it's not for me. And I had a very a consequence to my community immediately. You know, there's, there's no more room at the table or at the cafeteria or in the car going from the football game to the dance. I mean, it was very obvious, very quickly. And, you know, as a young man, it actually gave me quite a bit of, of resentment for, for that.

[01:11:44] MIM SCALIN: But it's interesting because Living in a big city, I think it just changes.

[01:11:49] MIM SCALIN: The whole picture of it, too.

[01:11:51] MIM SCALIN: I looked at a lot of different things. I grew up in a neighborhood that was Catholic. And I would go to church with my friends. They do communion, they wear little bride dresses and do confession, all that. And I really got turned off to things because I would go with my little girlfriend and I'd walk with her after school. She'd go to church, she'd do her confession, she'd walk home and she'd say, you, want to know what I confessed? I confessed, and I said, you don't need to say anything, because I knew the rules. She said, no, no, I confessed that I said bad things about my mom, to my mom. I use bad language.

[01:12:24] MIM SCALIN: And then we'd go to her, walk.

[01:12:26] MIM SCALIN: From there, we'd go to her house, her mother would make them little boring sandwiches, and we'd be in a room and her mother would say, Carol, make your bed or something. And Carol would say, you know, some terrible thing about quietly, but to her mother. And I go, oh, no, you said that.

[01:12:41] MIM SCALIN: And she said, oh, that's okay.

[01:12:43] MIM SCALIN: And I was I'll like go 11, to confession 12 next years week old and I'm tell the going, priest. this is, yeah, I know it's kind of an interesting. And then I would check out the Methodist Church where we had our Girl Scout meeting and check out different things. And in college, too, I would go to different places and see what fit. And the Unitarian Church here was really nice and, you know, different, just different kinds of things. And I could see where Community was someplace that, that these places I kind.

[01:13:09] MIM SCALIN: Of like Buddhist thinking. Sure.

[01:13:14] MIM SCALIN: And yeah. This has been very nice, Chris.

[01:13:21] CHRIS KRIEGER: I've really enjoyed it.

[01:13:23] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:13:23] MIM SCALIN: I have too.

[01:13:24] CHRIS KRIEGER: You're very well-rounded and you're not, I wasn't sure if maybe you might not be really hard set and fast. I'm gonna do whatever MSNBC thinks or whatever, but you're actually far more.

[01:13:40] SPEAKER D: Open.

[01:13:40] CHRIS KRIEGER: Minded than I am probably on something.

[01:13:46] MIM SCALIN: Oh my gosh. Well, it's really been very enjoyable. My son was right when he said, Just do this.

[01:13:51] MIM SCALIN: Just meet different people.

[01:13:53] MIM SCALIN: And quite interesting because the only thing I remember about Oklahoma, of course you're not originally from there, but my husband and I drove across country in 1970 and we camped out in our little VW square back. Oh, cool. It was orange and I made a like a place, you know, like a mattress, put the seat down mattress, made little cards. And until we got to Oklahoma, Oklahoma was good because it was, is there a place called like 10 killer dam or something like that?

[01:14:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: 10 killer lake, yeah.

[01:14:19] MIM SCALIN: Okay.

[01:14:20] CHRIS KRIEGER: That was one of the Cherokee chiefs, yeah.

[01:14:22] MIM SCALIN: Okay. So that was the last place where we camped out at night where there were actually trees and things because after that, any place we could stop, it was like a parking lot. And I said, we can't do this anymore. We have to, we don't have any privacy. We need to stay in a motel. So I do remember about Oklahoma being quite beautiful, very treed. And as we get a got across. And I was telling my grandbaby that I'm not so sure about some of the estates in the middle of the country.

[01:14:50] SPEAKER D: Yeah.

[01:14:51] MIM SCALIN: Yeah. Like, which I know Missouri, because it's near Illinois, I know Iowa, and I can. parse out where Oklahoma is because it's got the panhandle, there's Texas, but I'm not sure where exactly is Arkansas.

[01:15:04] CHRIS KRIEGER: Arkansas is just on the other side of the eastern side of Oklahoma underneath Missouri.

[01:15:10] MIM SCALIN: Oh, so that's right above Louisiana because I've been to New Orleans a lot. So I like, but it was funny because I was saying that's sort of.

[01:15:18] CHRIS KRIEGER: The Midwest, a lot of rectangular states. Well, Kansas there's is, not much Kansas there.

[01:15:23] MIM SCALIN: And Nebraska Yeah, we are drove really back. We drove the southern route to La and we drove the northern route back. So it was. It was really nice. But fourth of July in Kearney, Nebraska, which was really lovely with a bunch of strangers shooting off.

[01:15:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: Wasn't there a fort there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's. I took my daughter when she was 10 on a 5, 500 mile trip. through the American West, through nine states, and we never spent a night in a motel. And I had just bought an older, in good shape, Toyota Corolla, and my dad, you know, my dad didn't say a word when I took off on a cross country trip in a beat up old pickup that looked like Sanford and Son or something, you know? But when he knew his granddaughter, was gonna be, he said, you know, you can take your mom's Honda Civic, you know, you should take that, you know, and then two days later, he'd say, have you thought about taking your mom's? So we actually took a Honda Civic and I, we just worked out a great system for camping. You know, she'd help me set up the tent and then she'd start loading up with sleeping bags while I was cooking and sometimes we wouldn't even get the tent. We'd just sleep out underneath the stars and we did go up and see friends where I used to live in Idaho. I wanted her to see how her dad used to live because you know how the people where I lived are very, very rural, very rustic, not very rich. And it's, it's very different. And I think a lot of people down here don't think Americans live like that anymore, and they do, you know, so. but they're. And they're part of this arch conservative Catholic faction. I think they're called the Tridentines. Oh, but they.

[01:17:22] MIM SCALIN: Tridentine.

[01:17:23] SPEAKER D: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:17:24] CHRIS KRIEGER: The women have to wear head coverings to Mass and the masses in Latin and. But they had nine kids, so I. I was. I was one of the last of the non-family allowed to live on the mountain they owned.

[01:17:39] SPEAKER D: Wow.

[01:17:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: One of the last three people to live there that wasn't related. So, but I guess I was comic entertainment because I was the weird, you know, zany guy. But I was good friends with the oldest son of the family. He was the one who got me into packing.

[01:18:00] MIM SCALIN: Nice.

[01:18:01] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so we worked together with the Forest Service for years.

[01:18:06] MIM SCALIN: It sounds like a good life, though.

[01:18:08] CHRIS KRIEGER: It was fun. It was fun. But it sounds so are you happy in Richmond or would you and your husband like to move somewhere else?

[01:18:17] MIM SCALIN: We've been lived here since 1968.

[01:18:21] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[01:18:23] MIM SCALIN: We have lots of friends, lots of good support system and our son moved back here from he went to New York, he moved back here wife and We're not going anywhere. I miss a big city in some ways and in other ways, you know, like we can go visit our daughter in Brooklyn and.

[01:18:39] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[01:18:40] MIM SCALIN: But I, yeah, there's certain things that, yeah, about the city that still need work. But it's changed.

[01:18:50] MIM SCALIN: It's gotten less Confederate. We have a fabulous art museum. We have a fabulous history museum. and both are right near next to each other. Just, I can, it's four blocks away. The History Museum is just absolutely fabulous. And so there's those amenities.

[01:19:07] MIM SCALIN: And we live in an inner city little tiny neighborhood of little houses in each unique separate, not townhouse. Our house was built in 1909.

[01:19:17] CHRIS KRIEGER: All right.

[01:19:18] SPEAKER D: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:19:19] MIM SCALIN: And it's an older neighborhood and it's walkable and we sit on our little porch and watch dogs and people. And so I, I don't, we're here. We're not going anywhere.

[01:19:30] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[01:19:30] MIM SCALIN: That's, if I could teleport, though, if I could teleport, I would go back and visit Japan. I would go back to Paris and spend a few days in my favorite spots. I'd go to Buenos Aires again and, and just, you know, have an, have an, and I'd go to a few cities that I haven't been to, and I'd go to a few states that I haven't been to. I've never been to Idaho or Oregon or So, but I cannot teleport.

[01:19:55] CHRIS KRIEGER: And so, well, if you ever figure that out, please let me, please share.

[01:20:00] MIM SCALIN: I will share with you. This has been a very pleasant evening and I really needed it because it was a crazy day. Plumber came this morning, got the shower working though, so I didn't have to keep turning the thing off and on. And my friend's son came and worked on our dishwasher and got that working. And so that was good. Good. And yeah, and the grandbaby was a distraction all day long.

[01:20:22] CHRIS KRIEGER: Sure.

[01:20:23] MIM SCALIN: 12 year old, it's like. But I was feeling the pressure because of having to take care of all these little things and my husband can no longer deal with that. And then I thought, well, I'm just gonna do this. And it was really, really nice, really pleasant. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for speaking with me and thank you for choosing to speak with me.

[01:20:41] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, thanks for having me along. I really enjoyed getting to know you a little bit. Would you like to exchange emails at all?

[01:20:47] MIM SCALIN: Sure, I'll do that.

[01:20:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay. Mine is all small letters. It's #-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#-#. #### ## # ## #####.

[01:21:17] MIM SCALIN: I knew you were going to say #######. Once you start to spell it and you said it was there was it was German in your background. I knew that it was going to be true. And mine is M-I-M as in my first name.

[01:21:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay.

[01:21:30] MIM SCALIN: And the numeral for ### #-#-#.

[01:21:37] MIM SCALIN: ## #####.###.

[01:21:40] CHRIS KRIEGER: ## #####. Okay, gotcha.

[01:21:45] MIM SCALIN: Great. We can talk about books.

[01:21:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, yeah, I was in a band book club for a while, and we. I really liked it. And some of the people in the group was. Were we. We had a. A mother of, with some teens and early 20s that were coming out. And another one, so we read a lot of banned books that were banned for that reason here in Oklahoma and Tennessee. But the problem with it was a lot of people got into listening to them instead of reading them.

[01:22:22] MIM SCALIN: Oh, yeah. So I don't, yeah, I can't do audiobooks.

[01:22:29] CHRIS KRIEGER: Yeah, I'm the same. I miss too much.

[01:22:33] MIM SCALIN: Yeah, me too. I get distracted. I get distracted. I get very distracted. I blame it on the pandemic. Yeah, I think I was always distracted, but now I'm like, it was so nice. Thank you so much. Thank you for choosing for whatever reasons you chose to speak to this old lady. And I am older than your father.

[01:22:53] CHRIS KRIEGER: Okay, well, I wasn't sure to ask you because people seem so self-conscious in America. So I did want to ask you, what is Mim short for anything?

[01:23:03] MIM SCALIN: It was a nickname and I chose to make it my legal name because, and it's a quick story, I was named after my grandfather who died before I was born and I always heard you're named after your grandfather. He was a terrible person. He abandoned his family in Ukraine and he never sent for them and he was a horrible person. to them when they came. And then I would hear, oh, you're named after your grandfather. So when I went and had another degree, got one of my degrees in my 40s, and I decided this might be the degree I put up on a wall, you know, in case it was something I had to show this diploma. And I didn't want that name after that. He was a horrible person to be on the wall. So I legally changed my name to my nickname, okay.

[01:23:48] CHRIS KRIEGER: All right. Because it's unusual. First name. I was saying, what is that short for? And it was like.

[01:23:56] MIM SCALIN: It was short for your. Your grandfather's a horrible person.

[01:24:02] CHRIS KRIEGER: All right, well, that's a good choice, then. Sounds like. Well, you know, and I've got this.

[01:24:07] MIM SCALIN: Book, and I've got this thing over here, and I wrote a bunch of. Thank you so much.

[01:24:10] CHRIS KRIEGER: Thank you. You know, you. I think it's so cool that. you are always going, you've always, like you've had all these different jobs and you're interested in so many different things. I think that's even languages now and book clubs and terrific. Awesome.

[01:24:26] MIM SCALIN: Thank you. Thank you. I hope I keep this energy. My mother died at 101, so I hope I keep that path.

[01:24:33] CHRIS KRIEGER: Well, I hope I get, I keep that invigoration too. So thanks for inspiring me a little bit. and take care. Namaste.

[01:24:42] MIM SCALIN: Namaste.

[01:24:44] CHRIS KRIEGER: Bye-bye.

[01:24:45] MIM SCALIN: Bye. I don't know how to get out of this. Can you. What do we do?

[01:24:49] CHRIS KRIEGER: We go to the upper left hand corner, just above your screen.

[01:24:52] SPEAKER D: Oh. Oh.

[01:24:53] MIM SCALIN: There it is. Thank you.

[01:24:54] CHRIS KRIEGER: Click on there, it'll ask you to confirm.

[01:24:57] MIM SCALIN: Good night.

[01:24:58] CHRIS KRIEGER: Good night.