And the Winner is ...

47 Ways Forward - Strategies for Navigating the Next Four Years

All my awards by Age 18, left to right. 1.) Second place, 1975 Des Moines Jewish Community Center Basketball league. 2.) Participation trophy, 1979-80 Valley Singers. 3.) 1980 Best Male Singer, VHS. *There were only two senior male singers. The other, the late Loren Lodge, won a much bigger award. 4.) Plaster cast of my face, age 18.

1

February 11, 2003. I woke up in the middle of the night. Couldn’t fall back asleep. I was untenably sad. And then I realized why. It was the third anniversary of my mother’s untimely death.

That year this particular day was going to be even harder because the year before my beloved step-mother Laurel had passed away, also on February 11th, from the same cancer as my mom.

So I decided to distract myself with work and headed off way before sunrise to my writing office, which was a studio apartment on Montague Street, right off the Brooklyn Heights’ Promenade.

A few hours later, with music blaring, I was typing away when the phone rang. Someone – don’t remember who – was shrieking, and it was mostly indecipherable but I made out “congratulations!” and then I heard the call waiting BEEP, clicked to the other line to hear my wife Susan say, “Oh my god, Peter, you’ve just been nominated for an Academy Award.”

I hurried home. Our boys were nine and seven at the time. We celebrated for a few minutes and then Susan and I walked them to school, like any other day.

2

In April of 1979, my now sober mom invited me to spend the night in her new apartment across the street from Valley High School, where I was a sixteen-year-old junior. That night, my mom made my favorite meal, fried chicken, and we sat on her fold-out couch and joy-watched the 51st Annual Academy Awards together.

It was just my mom and me and her TV. One highlight – my hero at the time, Sir Laurence Olivier, was given an honorary Oscar. And at one point – while I was either downing a handful of jellybeans or devouring more popcorn – my mom whispered with a quiet confidence, “One day, Peter, you’ll be up there.”

Just the thought that my mom thought one day something like that might be possible, lovely.

3

While I have yet – and suspect will never be — up there in the literal sense, I have been privileged to attend the Academy Awards three times – once as a nominee, once as the +1 to the Oscar nominated actress who starred in my first film – and finally as the proud parent of our then 19 year old son who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

And while I didn’t go to prom when I was in high school, I realized halfway through my first time at the Oscars – Oh, this is just prom for famous people.

4

I love Awards. I love them so much that in high school I even invented my own.

My beloved drama teacher, Mr. Jim Lamson, gave me the nickname “Tyrone” – after the great British theater director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie who had founded the great Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Each year, members of the Valley High School drama department chartered a bus (or buses) to travel to Minneapolis where we would attend two plays in one day at the Guthrie, and experience the best theater we’d ever seen.

To be called “Tyrone” by Mr. Lamson was a source of immense pride for me. It felt like a recognition of the kind of artist I one day hoped to be.

Near the end of my senior year, I decided to create the Tyrone Award. Yes, there was perhaps an excessive amount of hubris, but I’d like to think that mostly I just wanted to celebrate and honor the work of my peers.

My mom and I designed the award, but she made it all possible. In her studio on East 6th Street in Des Moines, she silk screened each award by hand. I wrote the citations and she copied them in her most elegant penmanship.

Twenty-two Tyrone Awards were given out like Halloween Candy. Awards for Outstanding Performance in a Leading Role, Supporting Role, Outstanding Props, Lighting, Outstanding Freshman, etc. The word “best” was nowhere in any of the citations. Each award was put behind glass in sleek black frames made by my mom.

At the end of the year drama banquet, I presented the awards with probably way too much aplomb. After the last of the Tyrones had been handed out, I was surprised when rising senior Marty Berk presented me with a Tyrone of my own.

Sometime while making all the awards for all my friends, my mom decided I deserved one, too.

5

While I love awards, my interest in them has waned significantly over the years. I would like to think it’s due to my increasing maturity and a realignment of my priorities, that I’ve moved from a self-centered place to having more interest in and love for others. During these last many years, I try to remember the next of my 47 Ways Forward:

#21 A well-lived-life should be its own reward.

That said, it turns out I still hold a soft spot in my heart for people who ache to be recognized. How do I know this? A surprising wash of warm feelings that I’m still processing for our former 45th – now felonious 47th US President.

There’s so much about Donald Trump I don’t get.

But his hankering for awards? That desperate part of him speaks to me. OK, sure, it’s the earlier-in-life, much-more-needy, 17-year-old-version-of-me that has immense compassion for the DonOld’s great crave to finally be given his due and get the much longed for respect that he clearly feels he deserves.

Apparently being elected president twice isn’t enough.

However, what would be an endearing quality in a dotty and distracted aged uncle loses its luster when it’s the insatiable pining of the world’s most powerful man.

In the last few weeks, he’s campaigned openly for that granddaddy of all awards – the Nobel Peace Prize …

He’s completely clear about it. He wants it. He wants it bad. And if his band of billionaires could buy it for him, we all know they would.

As I was about to publish this post, it appears that Israel and Hamas have reached a ceasefire of sorts. It’s too soon to tell – but highly unlikely – that this peace will last.

A cynical person might even think that this last minute, long overdue peace pause between Israel and Hamas was brokered to buoy his Nobel Peace Prize chances.

Maybe this will be the beginning of a Scrooge-like Christmas Carol conversion and Trump will transform from the needy, petulant 79 year-old-man-child into a wisened, humble leader, a peace seeker and keeper. I’m more of a believer in Maya Angelou’s “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

That said, here’s hoping.

Time will only tell. Until then, I suggest we give Donald Trump the award he most deserves.

And there’s a precedent for what I’m about to propose. After all, he alone renamed “The Gulf of Mexico” and he alone renamed “The Department of Defense.”

Maybe he should’ve thought about that a bit more. Maybe if he’d changed the “Department of Defense” to the “Department of Peace” he would’ve upped his odds.

But no. We’re now living in a “Department of War” world. And today – as our wannabe dictator turns his masked, unidentified ICE Agents and unwanted National Guard troops on the good people of Chicago and Portland and who knows where else, he is far from being worthy of any peace prize.

So in the same name-changing spirit of DJT, let’s give him the award he deserves:

For turning his own troops on his own people, the Nobel Committee is pleased to award Donald J. Trump the 2025 Nobel Prize for War.

***

Peter Hedges is a founding member of Signs of the Time and a proud member of the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative.

Signs of the Time can be found on Instagram, FaceBook, and here on Substack.