My wife Karen and I flew out to Iowa for a week during the Christmas break, to be with our son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in West Des Moines, and to spend a few days with Karen’s mother three hours to the northeast in the little town of Cresco, near the Minnesota border. Karen once did a twelve-foot bronze of Nobel prize-winner Norman Borlaug (inventor of the miracle grains that saved India) that still stands nobly in the town park, under the elms at the corner of Route 9 and Elm Street. I highly commend it to tourists, and insist it’s worth going out of your way for — from Rochester, Minn., to the north, Waterloo, Iowa, to the south, or LaCrosse, Wis., to the east.