Hope in the Longest Night

This edition of my weekly radio podcast Small Wonders (KWIT, Sioux City, IA, an NPR affiliate) has to rank as one my all-time favorites. It's seven years old, but it attempts to satisfy all kinds of people and their various ambitions for the holiday seasons we're beginning, or in, right now. 

I really do love this one.

Listen in here,

Prayer for the Dead -- iii

To say Bea Van Klay is "haunted" by memories is going too far. The memories stick with her, in part, because they feed her anger at her parents for what she thinks of as their abandonment, their deep conviction that bringing the gospel to the Navajo is a far more important task than raising their children.  Did they love their daughter?--without a doubt, they did. They were merely following conviction and convention, and I'm sure that her rebellion against them and their way of life was devastating. 

Meanwhile, it's Christmas, she's refinishing her parents' old dining room table, an antique, while her husband is out playing Santa to his work crew. Her daughter has called and unloaded on her, telling her she doesn't want her children to go through a childhood like she did--without grandparents.

Her situation prompts her memory to replay some of the ancient offenses, the ones that she relies on to fuel her very human anger. Throughout her life, Bea has lost her faith, but I want to do with the story is at least begin to bring her back. We reenter the story with a flashback.

I was refinishing a table when I wrote the story, and I remember thinking that something as old as the table I was working on held secrets, had to. Okay, what if, long ago, someone deliberately hid something beneath the linoleum covers people put on their tables back then? What might it be and why was it there. Fiction is often a matter of "what if?"

__________________


In the middle of the night her parents are awake. She hears the bed wince as they rise together, the closet doors shiver open, clothes rus­tle. They wake her, tell her they must leave. They'll be back, they tell her, her father's stark outline bathed in the light from the hallways as he stands at the foot of her bed. They leave, and she and Peter are alone.

"Just about your age," her mother told her, "and so much like you­--your height almost. Dark eyes. Esther Nez. She'd found peace, sweetheart. She's been forgiven. Isn't it wonderful?"

The table stood between them. When she wouldn't answer their question, her mother drew back from her father's arms, brought her hands up to her eyes.

"Do you know the Lord, Bea?" her father asked. "That's what we need to know," he said. "Do you know Jesus?"

She felt her father's eyes planted. They never shifted, even when she gathered her strength and stared back at him, as if cursing. "Yes, of course. Of course, I do."

The arrogance of her answer kept them from asking again.

Mutton they had for dinner that Christmas Day because everywhere you looked in those days sheep wandered the reservation. Mutton and beans. Bread and coffee.

She pulled another putty-knife from the rack, a small one, then plugged in the emery wheel on the workbench and slid the edge of the knife across the whirr, shooting sparks up toward the calendar girl Myron had pinned up on the tagboard years ago. She had to be careful because she didn't want to gouge the surface, even though she could sand away light slips easily enough.

A half dozen linoleum strips still stuck to the table. She lay the edge of the putty-knife at the point of the largest chunk, raised her wrist against the play of the blade, jammed it into the seam, lifting the linoleum, then picked up the corner once it was loose enough to grab with her fingers.

"What she'd done," Bea thought, just because Char thinks it's her job to bring peace now that she's found Reverend Van's Jesus. But it won't happen, not with both of them dead, her mother years ago already and now her father too, laid on that slope above the shacks in the little town he'd made up his mind never to leave, both of them asleep in the cemetery where food offerings for the dead littered the ground with pagan honor.

She pushed the blade beneath the biggest chunk and grabbed what she'd turned up, then jerked the knife along--like skinning an animal, the way the Indian boys used to tug the bluish pelt from a rabbit's back with a wet ripping sound. She curled the piece into her fingers, put down the knife and wrapped her other hand around her wrist, then leaned over the table to balance herself, jerked hard, and the whole diamond-shaped piece came off in her hands, wide as a book cover.

She tossed it in the shopping bag with the rest of what she'd already scraped, but it twisted as it fell, and she saw something shiny, glim­mering as if wet. She reached down into the bag and when she pulled it out again she found a star in a cellophane wrapper stuck to the back of the linoleum.

At first glance she thought it was something scissors-cut from very delicate paper, but when she tore it loose from the back of the linoleum it was thicker than paper-something fabric instead, or woven. Tatting, that's what it was--a tatted medallion star.

She looked back at the table, at the spot where it had come up, and found no trace of adhesive, the dull, unsullied grain where it had lain the only clean spot on the surface. That star had been wrapped in cellophane and laid purposely under the thick linoleum. It was small enough to fit easily in the bowl of her palm, its points done in some intricate and personal weave like some language not yet written. Years before, her mother had worked sometimes at night, in those dark even­ing hours of winter, the shuttle a glint of silver passing expertly in and out of her open fingers as she nimbly turned out a cluster of tightened stitches, doilies, edging from handkerchiefs, and sometimes antimacassars--like the linoleum, to protect the back or arms of the sofa. A star in the desert, she thought, a hidden medallion star buried beneath the tabletop. Her mother's work. She removed it from the brit­tle cellophane. Its ecru knots, small, hardened fists, were shaped into a design so fine that one could easily forget the hours it took to create its delicate edges.

But why would her mother have buried it that way, laid a little piece of lace beneath her own tabletop?--a star, she thought, a desert star like a miracle from the bottom of the table, something unexpected, a little glint of beauty like a sign, she thought. Maybe like a testimony. It didn't really matter who would eventually strip back the linoleum and find her little miracle underneath--it could be Mother Van's only daughter or any of a hundred Esthers. She'd put the star there like a Bible story, like the gospel tracts she'd always leave in the Albuquerque bus sta­tion, a testimony planted for some wayward soul lost in the wilderness. She'd put it there so she could go to her death knowing that she still had one last tatted voice pointing to Jesus. Just more of the same, Bea thought.

When she opened the stripper, the can exhaled fumes that stung her eyes. She pulled on her rubber gloves and poured it over the table sur­face, the brash smell lining her nose as she spread clumps flat over the wood, the last slivers of linoleum, and the tracks of the adhesive. It was so much like her mother she almost had to laugh, a bad joke on her daughter. The one thing of her mother's she had touched in more than forty years, and it comes up as just another sermon. The stripper soaked up the old surface and turned cold where it dirtied her gloves.

But how could she know it would be her daughter? Maybe preaching wasn't the idea. After all, only someone already a Christian could read the symbol right. It would mean little to a Navajo. Besides, if her mother wanted to bury a tract, she could have. Maybe as a young bride she buried it the way the hired man in the parable buried the one talent the master had given him--because she feared the stiffness of her hus­band's commitment, was afraid of what he might say about silly lace. Over the years, maybe her mother had taught herself to mistrust something which existed for beauty's sake alone, as if her medallion were a token of selfish pleasure. Maybe she'd buried it because it was only beauty.

Prayers for the Dead -- ii

Bea gets a friendly Christmas-season call from Char, her daughter and friend, who has her warm and seasonal aspirations on Christmas Eve.

"We just thought we'd call, Mom," Char said. "We just opened presents and the kids are all busy by the tree. I thought I'd wish you a Merry Christmas."

"You didn't have to do that," she told her daughter.

"Dad's gone, I suppose?" Char asked.

"He's on the sleigh. It's something he's got to do now, whether or not he wants to," she said. "His men expect it."

"You mean he didn't want to go?"

"You know your father," she told her, "the damned fool."

''I'll get Randy to run you over here," Charlotte said. "I don't like the idea of you sitting there alone on Christmas Eve again. What are you doing anyway?"

She looked back at the putty-knife stuck beneath the linoleum. "I'm watching TV," she said. "Don't worry about me. If you pick me up, your father won't know up from down when he steps in the front door. You know how he gets."

"He shouldn't drive, Mom," she said.

"Sure," she said, "of course, he shouldn't drive."

'Tm serious," Char told her.

"And so am I." She twirled the cord in her fingers. "He thinks every Santa Claus gets a Rudolph or who-knows-what other kind of grace to get him home safely."

"I think you shouldn't be alone, not on Christmas Eve."

"Been that way for years," Bea said.

In the background she could hear the children buzzing and carols, the kind of Christmas music she'd expect from Char now that the whole family had found Jesus, all of them baptized.

"You're welcome to come to church with us tomorrow, Mom," Char said, "on Christmas Day."

“I know what day it is.”

"I just thought I'd mention it."

"I have my crossword puzzles and there's a Bob Hope special com­ing up. You just get back to your family." She looked up at the clock above the tool rack. "He'll be back--"

"It's early," Char said. "I just wish he wouldn't drink."

"Keep your nose out of his business, Charlotte."

"Randy can be there in fifteen minutes, Mom. You should see Brandon--he's sitting here on the floor already building all kinds of things, and Sarah's dressed up--"

"I got Myron to tend to--"

"Tomorrow, then?"

"Tomorrow what?"

"Tomorrow church."

"Tomorrow he's got a headache. Maybe we'll stop over in the afternoon once he sleeps it off."

"They're your grandchildren--the only ones you have. They love you too." Char stopped for just a second, took a breath. "Listen, I won't let you do to them what you did to me-and your mother."

Bea let that line alone.

"Did you hear me?" Char said.

"What's that?"

"I said I won't let you do what you did to me--and what you did to your mother,” she repeated.

“What was that again?”

"You know damn well, Mother." Her voice abruptly lost that Christmas-y tone. "I never had a grandma," Char said. “That’s what.”

Bea looked at the phone, then laid it back on the hook. “What she'd done,” she thought, “what she'd done.” Char ought to know sometime what nine months in the basement of the school was like-right beside the washtub's leaky faucets. What it felt like to be a kid scared to death of rats, just seven years old--a boarding student. How she'd cry on Mon­days when her father would get her up in the mornings so early the sun was barely set from the day before, get her and Peter up to take them to Split Rock mission school, how she'd be there all week long until her sometimes-father drove back to pick them up. "Did you have a good week at school?" he'd say, and then his mind would wander out into the desert, some hogan. By third grade--no more--she quit answering his polite questions.

_____________________

Just a word about the "ins" here, the quickly told stories Bea doesn't tell her daughter but relives herself are, of course, back story, a reflection of the past she can't help going through because of what her daughter has said--"what she'd done." Fifty years ago, missionaries most always brought their children to the Mission School while doing their evangelism all around the reservation. My friend told me he felt abused and abandoned--he was five and staying with another kid in some basement "apartment." What Bea remembers here is all taken from the experiences told me by the other youth leader at the retreat. We talked--he talked--late into the night. He had much to say.

Prayer for the Dead (a story for Christmas) -- i

 

I remembered yesterday that I'd once written a short story about a woman who'd got herself tossed out of a family by her missionary parents, a story about her life one Christmas when she found herself almost mysteriously led back towards parents she'd come to hating (it's a long story). I've been flirting seriously with one last book of short stories, stories whose origins are stories in themselves, like this one. 

One night at Rehoboth, New Mexico, I listened to a son of long-ago missionaries tell me of his anger at his parents for what they'd done to him (again, a long story). We were staying up late because we were on guard duty--it was a youth retreat and both of us were youth group leaders from Phoenix, Arizona, who'd come with our church kids to the reservation.

It was an unforgettable night for me because he told me things I really wouldn't have understood without him. He said it took him many years to come to terms and make peace with his parents. His sister--I asked him about her--she still hadn't, he told me.

So the historical background of the story includes missionaries on the Native reservations. In my short story, both parents have passed away, but their daughter--like my friend's sister--was holding out. Bea is that rebel, the one far away from the fold. She's refinishing an old oak table, the one her parents kept in their dining room for just about all of their married lives. Her daughter wanted to keep it--well, discover for yourselves in "Prayer for the Dead." 

The story will run 'till Christmas.

______________________________

Every Christmas her father used to say that when Jesus would come to earth again he'd feel at home on the reservation because the desert would remind him of the Holy Land. Then Dad would close the Bible, having read Luke 2 once more. "Bethlehem probably looks just like Split Rock," he'd say, the town where Beatrice Van Kley spent sixteen years, every school year of her life, and a place she never considered holy at all.

She opened the side door so the fumes from the stripper would escape the garage to the cold darkness. Just above the fence between the lots, reflections from Christmas lights at most every home down the block glanced off the shiny tops of two cars parked next door.

She tugged the exercise bike off to the side, in front of the washer and dryer, and laid newspapers down over the floor where she'd planned to do the work. She'd spent an hour before supper redoing a seam on Myron's Santa suit, where somehow last year, his elbows up, he'd jerked out the stitches again, creating a wide gap that yawned open to his T-shirt the minute he crossed his arms. "You can't wear it this way," she'd told him. "You're silly enough doing this every year, but I won't have you leaving here all torn up--even if that's the way you come back."

"As if anyone cares," he'd told her. "They're not checking my seams, Tootie. This is Christmas Eve."

"Just the same," she'd said, "take it off and let me fix it. I don't want my husband looking like something from St. Vincent De Paul."

Eight stops he'd make this year. At each of his employees' houses he'd drop in, not unexpectedly, with a bonus turkey and a little stray cash, a Christmas cowboy in a thick white beard. The life of the party. Always. And every place he'd go, he'd have a drink. Or two.

"And don’t come home sloppy,” she’d tell him. “You’re the only Santa Claus I know that's likely to fall into a fireplace without going down a chimney."

"Where's your holiday spirit?" he'd said.

"You're my holiday spirit," she told him, taking his last kiss on the lips before he left.

Her son Frank lived in Denver--her son by Shorty Toledo, the Hopi she'd never married. Frank showed up once or twice a year if he needed money, or phoned when he got in trouble. Otherwise, she never saw him. The first time he'd stood before a juvenile judge, a man whose mustache swirled down almost to a goatee, he'd been given a slap on the wrist for breaking into vacant houses. She'd wondered whether his getting off easily was really best for a kid who had only ever been a problem. She couldn't help thinking there was a kind of paren­tal justice going on with Frank. 

She'd married Myron Burnett, part Apache but not much Indian, five years later, in 1951, at a JP just across the Nevada border, and not at all on a whim.

She rolled the table over to the newspapers from the spot where daughter Char had left it. "We'll pay you, Mom--that's not it. We're not looking for a gift," Charlotte had said. "It's just that you do such a nice job."

She wasn't so foolish as to miss the irony: Beatrice Van Kley lifting linoleum off her parents' table, stripping it down, then anointing it with a new stain sharp enough to bring life back to grain no one had ever seen. Char had picked it up from her uncle Peter when he came back from the reservation pulling a trailer full of things he said were worth more to him than what he could get at auction. Her brother had buried their father in the cemetery Dad, Reverend Van, always considered half-pagan, decorated as it was with food offerings honoring the dead, sandwiches left open in Saran Wrap, paper cups half full of Coke, toys, soccer balls.

Char said she wanted the table. She had begun to care about things like that, about missionary grandparents she'd never really known and a story Bea thought much better left to un­written history.

Years ago, her mother had covered her kitchen table with a heavy layer of linoleum that protected the new surface from wear. Both parents were dead and gone; they'd never appreciate the beauty they'd hidden away. Typical, she thought. Her mother was likely saving the finish for the second coming.

She pulled the edge of the linoleum high enough to slide a putty-knife underneath. Getting the linoleum off would be the worst job. It would tear off in shards and what she couldn't rip she'd have to inch off slowly. When the phone rang, she waded through gutter spouts Myron left around the garage and took the receiver from the wall.

______________________

Tomorrow: A phone call from her daughter leads into a further exploration of Bea's fractured parental relationships and her life these days.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .while you may be found.”

 Emily Dickinson is haunting. One of her many poems that will never leave me is one numbered “LV,” which begins “I know that he exists/Somewhere, in silence.” Profound sadness fills that opening line. She knows he is there—she doesn’t doubt his presence for moment; but He is silent.

He has, she goes on to say, “hid his rare life/From our gross eyes.” I think of a million prayers from Dachau and Auschwitz; a young mother mourning her son, killed on a motorcycle; a grandpa whose grandson was swept away in a prairie creek, the body never found.

Sometimes it seems that God has simply left the building.

Then Ms. Emily sports with this peek-a-boo behavior. “’Tis an instant’s play,” she says, “a fond ambush,/just to make bliss [ours, of course] earn her own surprise!” Notice the exclamation point. God plays with us, and isn’t that cute, she says, tongue in cheek.

“But should the play/Prove piercing earnest”—as it has last week in a million places around the world, in a million grieving families, “Should the glee” from this little game of hide-and-seek God is so fond of—should that glee “glaze/In death’s stiff stare,/Would not the fun/Look too expensive?”

What if we call on his name—what if our souls scream at the shocking death of a thirteen-year-old boy who won’t see another spring, will never kick a soccer ball, or lean into his mother’s shoulder on the couch before bed—what if God is playing this silly game at the moment we need Him most? That’s what she is asking.

Then—and it happens to many of us—“Would not the jest/Have crawled too far?”

The awful word here is crawled, because that word suggests a god who is, at best perhaps, a worm. Or sickness—this cute little game of his crawls.

I know some believers who can read Dickinson and not feel what she does. Some sanctified smiles simply write her off. But Dickinson is haunting because she’s on to something most believers feel during at least some moments of their lives—and she is a believer: “I know that he exists,” she says to start the poem. “I know.”

A line like David’s warning at the end of verse six inflames Ms. Emily’s anger in “lv.” David has just laid out the essence of God’s love—his forgiveness. Then he adds this caveat—“while he may be found.” In the words of the old psalm we used to sing, “Then let the Godly seek thee in times when thou art near,” especially then because it seems anyway that he’s not always conveniently located.

The most horrifying suggestion of David’s assertion is that sometimes he leaves.

If that makes no sense, you’ve begun to understand, I think, because it would be so humanly satisfying to create a God out of our finest aspirations.

But God is God. We worship him, not because he is the best of my dreams or imaginings, but because he is, ultimately, not made of what we are. He is not the best I can create on this page or pages, he is eternally much, much more.

His ways—and sometimes his seeming absences—are simply beyond our ken.

He is God. We are not.

Those who worship him, worship him in that fear, that unfathomable regard, that profoundly mystifying awe. We worship Him on our knees.   

Brooding Upon the Waters

Before you get all priggish and tell me that I've got no business reviewing a book by a Dordt prof named Schaap, let me explain. It's not mine. Friend and former colleague in arms, Howard Schaap (no relation) has published (it's taken some painful time) his father/son story, not as fiction but memoir--including names and dates and places. He's titled it Brooding Upon the Waters, maybe a bit pretentious, but just about perfectly fitting for what's inside the covers, a life lived in the shadow of his father's bi-polar world. Brooding is a beautiful book, but it's not at all pretty.

It's beauty arises from its almost perfectly arranged weave of significant tropes; first, the trials of father Milt's mental/emotional illness, which serves as the  major track of the novel--Milt's manic ups and downs. Second, Howard's own highly developed sense of place (it's set here in Siouxland, in southwest Minnesota) and the identity this particular landscape bestows on those who live  here, whether they like it or not. Amazingly but convincingly, Laura Ingalls Wilder has a kind of starring role, although it's more accurate to say her father does. As charming and wonderful as the rest of the family were, the old man is and was a stinker the TV show chose not to feature. 

A third strand is drawn from Milt's Dutch Reformed pedigree, his faith, no matter what he thought of it or where it took him, and its practice. Fascinatingly, Howard traces his own Schaap genes back to the very heart of the afscheiden, the breakaway naysayer churches around Ulrum, the Netherlands took almost 200 years ago, a break engineered and celebrated by the loyal followers of what became, to many, a sect. That separatist undertaken created a legacy then shaped by the American experience of life on the unyielding land around the Leota, Minnesota. Milt is himself a victim of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, when things went under for him, making him feel himself to be a loser.

There's  more, I'm sure, but these are most of the majors with the exception of fishing, which becomes, in his son's retelling, the saving grace of his childhood and his father. Let me just say I've always been a fisherman wannabe, never really did much serious fishing, so all the technicalities Howard musters sort of miss me. What doesn't miss me, however, is the joy (and relief) that fishing brings to father and son. I don't think  you have to love fishing to love the book because Howard the Writer handles those scenes with such attention that the attention itself is convincing and compelling. Oh, yes, there's the totemic walleye glory that attends every day in the boat or on shore. Father and son are ever vigilant about the lord of the lakes, the walleye. They don't bite easily, but when they're landed, they're sacramental.

Most of the memoire features Milt's prolonged and painful stay at Mayo where the hospitals' legendary staff try their best to deal with a tough, tough patient and never quite do. That stay is a unifier, but it has its own powerful drama.

Every once in a while, you have to remind yourself that this is a memoire and not a novel because the story is told in such a seemingly imagined fashion. Milt Schaap is (or was) a real human being. His daughters are Howard's sisters; his wife is Howard's mom. There are moments in the story when you can only imagine being a fly on the wall listening his sisters reactions to what he's committed to the pages of this story. 

It's a really wonder-filled read that you want to--and some readers will--put down in places, not because it's boring (Howard's abilities as a writer are ever-evident), but because you just don't want to read what's almost inevitably coming.

Howard Schaap's Brooding Upon the Waters is really, really something. You won't put it down, even though you'll want to. Like I say, it's perfectly beautiful, but not at all pretty.

Morning Thanks -- Watchman deployment

The procedure was performed in conscious sedation with Dr. Rajpurohit, [a man I don't remember at all, may not even have been a male], performing periprocedural TEE [having something pushed down your throat isn't pleasant figuratively or physically, but I'm not complaining]. Right femoral vein access was obtained without difficulty using ultrasound guidance and initially a 6-French sheath. Perclose device was pre-deployed for closure after the procedure. ["No difficultly" was true, I guess, but I was potted--what did I know?]

Then, using J-wire, a 16-French sheath was inserted without difficulty. Through this sheath using double curved Watchman sheath and Baylis wire, transeptal puncture [puncture?--sheesh] was performed in good position for Watchman implantation*.

If you haven't already guessed what's up here, this is an in-depth summary I took from my patient's page of what I did on Monday, when my wife drove me off the the Sanford Heart Center (Sioux Falls) for a procedure that should, if it works, allow me to forget all the blood thinners I've been taking for years. The Watchman devise--you may have seen the TV ads--works like a trap to catch any stray blood clots before they steal their way into other areas of the body--the brain, for instance, and cause real harm.

The LX Pro31-mm Watchman F is what's new to my body, as of Monday morning. One of these Watchmen is now, hopefully, I guess, implanted in the very heart of my heart. Sounds scary, but I don't think it was, at least the team who inserted those sheaths didn't act as if it was--lots of chuckles. But, back to the news.

The sheath was moved into mid left atrium. Wire and dilator were removed and through the sheath, pigtail catheter was placed in left atrial appendage. Angiography of left atrial appendage was performed [seriously>--who knew?). Next, the sheath was moved into left atrial appendage and through it and the pigtail was removed. Through this sheath, 31-mm Watchman FLX Pro device* was deployed [like the National Guard?] in good position across the left atrial appendage with T showing no color flow around its edges and compression ratio of 25% with no pericardial effusion post deployment.

It's good to know--"no pericardial effusion."

Having had the procedure--sounds much worse than it was--I stayed in a hospital bed for four hours--not fun, by the way--but I'm not complaining, then sent home. 

So, should you wonder, I was at Sanford Heart Hospital all day long, and the worse part was getting there--really thick fog. 

Twenty-some years ago, I started this blog as a thanksgiving journal. I'm returning today with deep thanks for the crew who gave me a Watchman FLX Pro, found a place for it in my heart, swept in and swept out without a problem. 

Just thought I'd mention it. With thanks.