In praise of Minnesotans

 

You can listen to this on a podcast:  https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-10-04/the-nobel-cheese-prize-sinclair-lewis-in-minnesota

The birthday of Sinclair Lewis is now a bit behind us, but in his honor, I thought I’d sing the glories of a Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger, served up with pickle and fries at the Palmer House, downtown Sauk Center, an old hotel that's not changed its features for more than a half century and fronts on Sinclair Lewis Street. I'm not kidding. Just down the way a few blocks, you can find the Sinclair Lewis home and on the south side of town, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. All true. Google it.

The Sinclair Lewis Cheeseburger

I can’t help but think all that glory is a bit ironic. Sauk Center's somewhat favorite son didn't much care for the codgers who peopled his hometown, or any Midwestern small towns, for that matter. The book that shot the moon for him, Main Street (1921), sold phenomenally and led, eventually, to Lewis's receiving the Nobel Prize (1930), the first American to win. Nothing to sneeze at.

In high school, I was forcefed Main Street. Hated the book. Not even sure I read it. Made no sense to me, largely because the book is acidic satire I wasn’t smart enough to see. What I do remember is how much "Red" Lewis despised his own, even people I knew in my own midwestern small town. He had reason, I’m sure: small towns can be death on individuals who are individuals. Lewis was tall, gangly, unathletic, and not much to look at. People say his father, the town doctor, never understood him. Those kinds of ingredients are not a recipe for success.

With weekly visits to a place called Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor celebrated his own Minnesota boyhood and Minnesota culture for years, and a audience from across the nation dialed in, belovedly. His 30th anniversary celebrated with a traveling show held in a bunch of small towns, to which he invited folks to bring picnic baskets and lawn chairs. Minnesota sweetness.

Mr. Keillor sports with his people, Mr. Lewis knifed ‘em.

The very idea of lawn chairs and picnic baskets would be anathema to Sinclair Lewis, Minnesota's Nobel Prize winner. He'd rip and tear at the backward souls who showed up. 

But today, this Iowan believes Minnesota can laugh at itself and love itself, almost simultaneously; and that's why I admire the place. Anyone who can be at home with a place called “the Gopher State" has to have a sense of humor. Minnesotans all buy truly Minnesota-thick winter gear--caps, jackets, vests from Bemidji Woolen Mills.

Not only that, but they wear all that Gopher gear with pride, arrogance even, whether or not their names are Olie and Lena. In the movie Fargo, the Coen brothers, great Minnesota filmmakers, worked the archetypes lovingly with a small-town cop named Marge Gunderson, who, in a cap with earmuffs, taught the nation how to speak Minnesotan, don’t you know?

So you’re wondering about that Sinclair Lewis cheeseburger—thumbs up or thumbs down? Listen, it wasn't half bad, served up on a hard roll too yet.

What's more, I can’t help but think there's some poetic justice in the fact that Sauk Prairie, Lewis’s home town, honors its Nobel Prize-winning novelist with a fat cheeseburger.

That is so Minnesotan. Got to love ‘em.

_________________________ 

The real reason I pulled this post out of mothballs is I wanted to extol a recent op-ed in the NY Times by Tom Friedman. It's very long, but perfectly wonderful and unflinchingly moral. If you want to understand what President Trump doesn't understand (and never will, read--or listen to--this convincing essay that explains "neighboring," something the world needs to learn. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026 /03/15/opinion/columnists/minneapolis-ice-trump-neighbor.html 

Old friends

Took me years before I knew that the Luxembourgers just down the road hailed from a country so small it wasn't greatly more spacious than Plymouth County, where a whole slew of them put down roots in the 1870s. Hard to imagine. 

It would take little more than a couple of hours to chase all the way across the country if you were visiting the Netherlands these days, distances being so short-circuited. Used the be stories circulated about relatives from the old country getting here to northwest Iowa and then asking nutty questions like "We go maybe to Niagara Falls tomorrow, you think? --and then the mountain with all those Presidents?" --travel agendas beyond the imagination. The size of things in this country is what they couldn't figure or imagine, that it would take them most of the day just to get east to Dubuque.

When the pioneer Luxembourgers' wagon trains crossed the state in 1870, travel time was two to three weeks, including over-night-ers to rest their trusty oxen. One can only imagine how spellbinding endless prairie must have seemed to them, how mysterious the eternal horizon must have seemed. One pioneer liked to say that when he arrived at this far corner, there was only one tree where eventually there would be a village named Orange City. 

All of which makes a single story more memorable than it might seem at first-telling. A man named Jacob Koster put down roots in a place to be called Sioux Center--right there in what is Central Park today. Koster came from southeast Minnesota to land they believed available--as long as you weren't Yankton Sioux. 

A mammoth cottonwood in Central Park ranks as one of the biggest--and likely oldest--in the entire state. I like to believe Jacob Koster planted it, but cottonwoods don't need us to plant them. That particular monster, however, marks the spot where the Koster decided to homestead.

Koster himself, or so the story goes, spotted somewhere south a column of smoke one wind-still morning, then saw it again and again days later, all of which fired his curiosity. Neighbors? Indians? One morning his curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to have a look, make it an adventure--took the whole family with him.

Must have been a hovel like the one his family lived in, chunks of sod set against a bit of a hill, a refuge from wind and rain maybe, but a refuge for all manner of critters as well. The Kosters spotted it maybe five miles from their own sod house. 

There they sat, some distance away in the wagon, when suddenly a woman stepped out and drew back the blanket that served as a front door. She was alone. 

Cautiously, Koster brought his wagon closer until she heard a foreign sound, someone nearby, and looked up, frightened.

Both of them fell into dead silence. There they stood, Jacob and family on the wagon, the woman dropping the pail she carried into the prairie grass. 

"Jacob?" she stammered, still as stone.

Silence spread out like the open prairie.

"And you are Yentje?" Koster said. 

Maybe he stepped down from the wagon. We don't know. I don't think he hugged her, both of them non-huggers of stolid Dutch stock. But they knew each other. Miracle of miracles, they knew each other.

The history book says the two of them had immigrated to the States at different times in different groups, Yentje and her family going to southern Iowa before coming farther northwest. Jacob, who we might just call an old boyfriend of hers, had arrived in America and moved west with another group of Hollanders, where--out in the middle of endless grassland--they stumbled into each other, both of them with families of their own trying to make do in this huge new world.

True story? It's one of those that, if it isn't true, should be. Two old friends, close friends, meet serendipitously--but blessedly--on endless Siouxland grasslands.

I don't know if the Luxembourgers have their own similar story, but if they'd like to borrow this one, they should feel free. Out here on the edge of the plains, it makes everyone smile.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .”

 All day long that summer day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the man who used to live next door—before he died several years ago—was cleaning out his father’s three-stall garage, one old two by four at a time. The next day, out front, there stood a pyramid of junk, which attracted me for some shady reason, but I did my best to stay away.

 I couldn’t see him from where I sat, but I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior of the old garage. What made the job worse was that his father was an ace tinkerer. I’m not sure whether he was, by nature, a pack rat, but his father’s ability to fix anything meant that nothing lacked value.  It was a huge job, and my guess was that his son would be at it again on the morrow.

 I found the whole operation scary.  The detritus one accumulates throughout life is incredible. When we retired, we moved out of town and into the country where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. It was great, but moving wasn’t. And now, once again, we moved—this time back into town for --  hurts to say this – senior housing. Every move requires tossing things, determining what’s junk and what’s not..

Here in my office, I’m surrounded by stuff I wouldn’t think of tossing, stuff that will be just so much junk to my kids.  Maybe I ought to buy one of those little guns that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a pin I got when I was asked to read an essay at a commemoration of 9/11—a year later.”  Who would ever know otherwise?  And who—well, no one—would ever care?

I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in the old days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of those were printed before the American Revolution.  When I’m gone, will anyone care? —or will those ancient texts simply be returned to another auction, where some anxious fancier will gleefully buy them, and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies—an endless cycle.

That next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life, a thought that would never have entered my mind 25 years ago, but now, as I approach eighty, may well be all too haunting.

 By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all.  Everyone must die. Count on it. All things must pass. Today, I sat at a coffee table with a man who was told just this week that he has pancreatic cancer. All of us, seniors, will go; he sees it coming more clearly.

Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it all must go.  Even my wife, even my children—we all will die.

 Like so many Bible verses, it’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph that sounds at the end of Psalm 32. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

 Rejoice, David says, as do all believers—“Rejoice and be glad.” Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—and the pile here in my heart. 

 Rejoice and be glad because God our Savior never tosses out a thing. 

On Hegseth's "sphere sovereignty"

I'm thinking I was in college before I ever heard someone with theological chops put two words together into a phrase with some chops of its own--"sphere sovereignty." I remember learning that "sphere sovereignty" was a phrase worth knowing, in part because it originated in the quite sovereign rule of a Dutch preacher/politician named Abraham Kuyper, a man who was spoken of in very high-regard-ish tones.

I wasn't the greatest student back then, never was really, so let me tell you what I remember of "sphere sovereignty": it was a good thing, a good, good thing because it set boundaries by making the claim that the institutions of society each had their own separate domain and calling, their own private property. Thus, the Christian school I attended as a boy was not run by the c0nsistory of the church, any church--it was "parental" Christian education because a stratagem of the Calvinism at the base of our faith ruled clearly--"Kuyper said it!"--that the church had its own "sphere" of influence, as did the school. While the same men (not women back then) could be members of the local Christian school board and members of the church consistory, one of those organizations should not run the other. 

Why? Because sphere sovereignty was a principle of life, or thus saith Abraham Kuyper, who, I learned, gives us Reformed-types our marching orders. When Kuyper created a university--the Free University--he named it what he did because it was free from entanglements of any political or ecclesiastical entity. In it's sphere--the sphere of education--it was sovereign--or free.

"Sphere sovereignty" might have created some heft at Dordt College midway through the 20th century, but it's never been slung around on a banner or proclaimed on a t-shirt in the U. S. of A, never, that is, until Pete Hegseth, Trump's Secretary of War (their language, not mind). 

Hegseth's form of Christian nationalism has its own take on "sphere sovereignty," and what he and his cronies say doesn't set forth the kind of liberty and diversity at the heart of the doctrine's original application. In other words, what Secretary Hegseth and other Christian nationalists (who often brandish the word "Reformed" too) are selling isn't what I heard for the first time in 1966 just a few blocks down the road from where I'm sitting.

As Justin Bailor, from Calvin University, writes in a recent column in World, 

. . .it is Christ who is sovereign over all, and not any institution or any particular Christian–whether preacher, pope, or prince. A proper regard for the origins, essence, and purpose of sphere sovereignty reveal it to be a theory of limited government, and even more than that a theory of social diversity, cultural pluriformity, and civil liberty. It is as such opposed to all forms of tyranny.

There's no room therein for Hegseth's noxious Christian nationalism. 

Thus saith sphere sovereignty. 

Updike's fortunes

 

I'll tell you, there's some astonishing familiarly to this shelf. At one time or another, I must have had just about every one of the books, or at least most. No more. My guess is that they were among the books I unloaded when I left my office at the college. I don't think they were ever home in our country place, and they certainly didn't come along to Woodbridge, the place we now call home. Where they once stood proudly, today they're gone.

In that way, I guess, their disappearance takes the same track as the work of John Updike does in the culture these days--he's simply not as hot as he once was. Critics far sharper than I am claim that some of what's there--the Rabbit foursome--won't disappear from American literary consciousness, nor will short stories still taught in Intro to Lit classes--you may remember "A & P," one of the most popular short stories in American literary history, or "Pigeon Feathers"--if I had that story anywhere here today, I could read it again and fawn embarrassingly about the Christian faith so beautifully evident at the end of that story.

Aspects of Updike's work, and his confession/profession in interviews--posited his deeply felt Christian faith. However, my mother would absolutely never considere him a "Christian writer." Nobody did sex as dreamily as he did--or as horridly. Nobody looked so closely without blushing. No world-class writers spent more time or interest in the male anatomy as did John Updike. 

And that itself may be one of the major reasons that his work has fallen out of favor with many of the mainstays of literary culture--if there are such folks.

My introduction to him came in an English class at Dordt College, when a brilliant but nutty professor named Meeter chose to bring in a copy of Couples he had been perusing and to read a hot passage--steamy and forbidden--in class, in public, standing right up in front, behind the podium. I'm not making this up. He wanted us to hear some torrid sex because he wanted his good Christian students to be as perfectly appalled as he'd been when all those gymnastics came alive on the page before him. 

Didn't work. I wasn't appalled, I was fascinated. I got interested in John Updike, out of class for sure. 

I'm no expert but it seems that Updike may have been one of the first to feature full frontal nudity in mainstream literature, as many writers broke down bedroom doors to bring us up close and personal to the act most of us crave. My literary hero at the time, Frederick Manfred, spent goodly hours watching nakedness do its thing. It was the late 60s, and lots of taboos were falling. Honestly, the only question I was asked that had real oompah when I interviewed for a job at Dordt, some years later, was "Will you teach dirty books?" a question that was so facile it answered itself. Imagine if I'd said yes!!!

Updike's disfavor today come at the hands of the "Me Too" movement as well as people tiring of white male writers. Today, some roll their eyes at some--if not all--of his fervid sexuality finding it altogether too, well, male--and too, yes, Protestant. And prurient. 

Still, I really, really admired the character Rabbit from Rabbit Run, and I'm quite sure--I hope I'm not being sexist here--that in Rabbit John Updike created a very real American character, a young man of his age, as was  John Updike himself, and, to be sure, at least one of his greatest admirers, me. 

Time changes things--that's maybe one of the best moral lessons I can pull from all of this. Thanks, Merle Meeter.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 32

 

“But the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.”

 Our former preacher once said that the first words that famous chorus of angels offered to the quaking shepherds on the hills of Galilee are the entire scripture in a nutshell: “Fear not!” Thar’ ‘tis--the whole Word of the Lord to those who love him: “Fear not.”

 Those two words are the heart and soul of this verse from Psalm 32 too, as well as the answer to the first question of the catechism I was reared with.  The question is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”  And the answer is simple:  “That I am not my own, but belong, in body and soul and in life and death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”  Same as.

 “The Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.”  Surrounds.  When my grandson and I go to the park a couple of blocks from our house, he’s a terror.  He’ll try anything.  The only way for me to keep him from scoring something purple on his forehead is to stand beside him or around him or behind him, close enough so that at any moment I can save him from his own. . .his own what?—silliness, childishness, inexperience, innocence, stupidity?  Maybe I should say, save him from being a kid.  Not unlike us.

 That’s not exactly what the verse implies, perhaps, but it’s close.  Try this—God’s love makes us all look like the Michelin Man.  In our every moment, he outfits us with rubber bumpers.  Okay, maybe it’s not the best image.  They’d get a little cumbersome, I think, and one couldn’t tap dance all that well.

 How about this?  When we trust him, we’re got airbags on all sides, like a Lexus maybe.  That’s surrounded.  But somehow it doesn’t quite ring true either—maybe because of the level of wealth the Lexus connotes. 

The first time I put on our married kid’s DVD player and heard the sound of Tora, Tora, Tora—or whatever—through speakers mounted in every corner of the room, the soundtrack took my breath away. I was in the middle of the action.  God’s love is like surround sound.  We are cocooned.  We’re swaddled in his love.  Whatever happens, we’re in his hands—always, forever.

 That still runs up short.

 If you think I’m being a little glib, you may be right.  I’m sitting here smiling, but then I’m not sure that a smile is the wrong tone of voice.  You may even call it childish, if you’d like, but the implication of this verse is soooooooooo good that it’s tough not to be a little goofy.  It’s hard to write without a smile.

Years ago, a woman told me a story of how, one night here on the prairie, her husband and young son were killed by a tornado that left her hospitalized on the edge of both death and despair.  She told me that the only thing that got her through her travail was her repetition of the answer I quoted above:  “I am not my own.  I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.. . .I am not my own.”

 A Calvinist mantra, so to speak. 

 In life and in death, David says, fear not.  The love of God surrounds you unfailingly. 

Say it again and again, Michelin Man.            

Way too many chains (reprised)

 

[This blog is getting ancient--twenty years old and more, thousands of posts, most of which can quietly slide into oblivion with no particular sadness or pain. But once in a while I go back a ways and hunt around for something lively, like this one from 2012. I'd just retired. I have no memory of where I was, but I remember the mammoth picnic table that earned, to my mind, a few words.]

I suppose one of the sentences I'm serving in my life is being forced to look at picnic tables.  I've lifted more than my share, painted dozens, even repaired 'em by the lot; so many that when I sit at one, I can't help look. And yesterday, here's what I couldn't help seeing.

When I walked out of church, it felt like early June in Omaha--had to be 60. The congregation was going to have lunch together and then do some caroling.  Imagine Christmas caroling in weather so warm you really should be playing church-league softball.  But I couldn't stay, so I got in the car and started steering north and homeward.

I grabbed a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich at Arby's--big mistake because it was too darn big--then decided I was retired and there was no reason to chase home on such gorgeous day, perfect for most anything but caroling. So, sandwich and curly fries in hand, I pulled over at a rest stop and took the closest picnic table. Everything tastes better outside, we used to say at the state park where I worked, even too much Philly cheese steak.

That's when I noticed the heavy chain beneath the table.  See it?. Incredible. You have to notice, first off, that nobody ever has to repaint this mammoth.  The top is that unforgiving hard rubber stuff, and the base is honest-to-goodness concrete. Nobody ever repairs this thing either.

And it's chained down--that's right, chained down, presumably because otherwise some petty thief idiot would walk off with it.  I can understand people wanting one of these heavy suckers in their backyard--it'll last forever!--but I could not begin to imagine how on earth some deviant yokel could grab one, then hoist it on the bed of a pickup without some huge wench and a world-class hernia.

Seriously, someone's going to steal this table?

What kind of world do we live in anyway?

We all suffer for the damned. Starts in third grade, when some kid rips up a library book and the rest of us lose our recess until the creep 'fesses up. Thus we strip at airports and let some unsavory stranger have a look at our private selves in an x-ray lest some fanatic Islamicist tries to light up his Nikes.

Made me sad, honestly, this human condition.  Some crew has to put chains on what must be a couple of hundred state-owned, ten-ton picnic tables because out and about on the land there's a highway robber who'd otherwise grab one of these and take it home?  Oh, geez.  Woe and woe and woe.

It was a gorgeous day. Thank goodness for global warming. But there I sat, stuffing my face and, on account of a heavy metal chain, lamenting the human condition. And I'd just come from church too.  What I should have done is turned around, gone back, and done some good old-fashioned holiday caroling.

Instead, I sat there angry, finishing that cheesy-mess of a sandwich--and the curly fries, all of 'em.

Woe and woe and woe. Sometimes, Lord, I think I got a chain on me.