Ms. Gloria Steinem (1934-2026)

 

'Strange--the way an image like this one yesterday--Gloria Steinem--brought me back to a wholly (and unholy) time in my life, a time when Gloria Steinem was parked somewhere close to the office of the Enemy, a time when I was somewhere just to the right, politically, of Barry Goldwater.

Gloria Steinem was not only a left-wing cheerleader, she was that side's leading scorer, a registered American snobby Easterner, whose good looks were immensely deceiving because she didn't think much about men--despised them actually, I thought, even though I don't remember ever concluding she was lesbian. What she was was impossible for me to understand--a woman with the standing of a beauty queen who refused to be what I figured a woman needed to have, needed to be. 

She was (hold your nose!) a feminist, that's for sure, a woman who couldn't shoot down a man with a 30-06, not because she couldn't--she had the looks--but because she chose not to, all those good looks (look at those legs, that hair!) going to waste because to her, I couldn't help thinking, men were the root of all evil. I was the enemy.

In addition, she was the leading spokesperson (not spokeswoman) for abortion, which gave her an office just around the corner from the Anti-Christ. That hair and those aviator glasses yesterday brought me back to the far-right side of the political spectrum. I didn't keep track of where she went during the next decades, what causes she advocated through the years, although I can't imagine her advocating for anything to the right of what she held dear fifty years ago. It was not at all easy to imagine what she looked like at 92 years old because she was, she really was, a "looker." 

It's exactly that kind of assessment she fought to control, to end, even as she came, to me at least, to embody it. She is partially responsible for my being able to understand how "looker" makes it sound as if I'm judging livestock, which, I suppose, I was.

I understand the accolades  that came in for her yesterday. Every news show paid homage--celebrated her strength and courage while going through life on the far edge of liberalism.

 When I saw the picture, what came back (I didn't ask!) was lots of fear and hate. Ms. Steinem carried the flag for American libs--that woman in that picture was the embodiment of everything I feared in early '60s politics, feared and despised. 

She didn't teach me how to hate--I came by that on my own.

I stand in need of forgiveness, not for my political views but for remembering how easy it was for me to hate.  

Last night's gully washer

 

I used to say that here, in northwest Iowa, the weather--no matter what the specifics--always comes in spades. That's overstatement, of course, but somehow people let me by with it because they knew that the sentiment wasn't wrong. High winds came by early this spring, and the trees--those still standing--still look battle weary. It's true we haven't had a real rock 'em, sock 'em blizzard for a few winters, but all that means is that the chances of getting one this year are better than ever. 

We've just about put behind us the hottest summer on record, but the heat continues--it's supposed to be 90 today. One of the handiest ways to describe northwest Iowa weather is the line about having only two seasons here, winter and July 4.

Last night I was awakened twice by a thundering-huge gully washer, one of them featuring the distinct splatter of hail. We no longer live out in the country, where you really can't help feeling that real drama like last night's, weather-wise, is meant personally. You start asking yourself what you've been doing to deserve the tongue-lashing or the fisticuffs from heavy-laden skies. 

Storms won't strand us here in our new little fortress community, won't make us feel picked out or on--the neighbor to the right is a wall away. When those to the left use the bathroom late at night, the light streams in our bedroom. 

No matter. I've officially passed through the age when I found Iowa storms a blast. I've been victimized. Whether I have PTSD or not is a question some psychologist would have to determine, but last night when the rain came and the hail banged on the windows, I cowered a little because even today, a year and a half or more since we entertained the Floyd River--four or five feet of it--in our walkout basement, I get edgy in a gully-washer. I'll admit it. 

There are perfectly good reasons not to live in northwest Iowa, but, just the same, the weather isn't one of them. Not really. 

This morning outside our window, the sun colors the grass in bright emerald, enrobes our lawn in royal green like the queen's carpet. The trees--some of them still bearing the scars of that spring wind--are dappled in the Midas touch of early morning sunshine.

Once upon a time, my Schaap great-grandparents lived here in a world far more like the one we left behind. I'm sure they remembered the gray skies of their island home on Terschelling, the Netherlands. I'm guessing that must have been greatly taken with abundant clear skies over the prairie. 

We're on our way to fall right now, even though it feels for all the world like and extended summer. Soon enough I'll get out sweat pants again--and a sweatshirt untouched for months.

I'm not complaining. Many moons ago, we could have stayed in the heat of Arizona.

 For the record, it's supposed to be 90 today, with a chance of storms again tonight.

We'll be okay. 

Stories of stories

It's difficult to do anything but reminisce when you get old, in large part because there's ever so much behind you and not a whole lot to look forward to. So, having been suitably employed right here before a keyboard for a half-century or more, it's hard not to look back: there's just more to see. 

Right now I'm working on two books, two collections of things I've done over the years. One of them, something I'm calling Stories and their Stories, examines a dozen or so stories of mine and adds commentary that often explains those stories' origins. There will be at least two of my voices between the covers--the writer and the teacher. 

Will anyone care enough to buy it? I don't know, but selling books isn't necessarily my objective. For my birthday last February, my daughter gave me one of those books full of questions sons and daughters give to their parents, a book full of questions that asks their parents to describe their lives. The truth is, answering those kinds of questions is something I've been doing for a half-century, so I'm thinking Stories and their Stories should answer lots of my daughter's questions. 

The gloss of the book--the material that explains stories' origins--is almost entirely biographical. This morning I thought I'd run just such an example, in part because it so happens that I ran the entire story in this blog twice.

So here's the kind of thing this old buck is working on right now.

_______________________ 

The teaching life is anything but sedentary. I looked forward to retirement, especially after a difficult last year in our department; but one incident in the last few weeks of my teaching life gave me a heartache. Some campus group, celebrating something in the Rec Center, had set up a whole number of inflated playthings, including a long racetrack of sorts---great fun, I assumed, but not for someone old enough to be retired.

“Dr. Schaap,” some student said. “Come on—I’ll race you.”

Oh, my, I wanted to. I knew this dare was the last one I would ever likely get. The way students keep you young was, painfully, coming to an end and would soon be gone altogether. I couldn’t have said yes, even had I wanted to.

There was a time in my life when I was just five years older than my students. At the time, I remember thinking that someday we’d all be old and there would be no appreciable difference between us.

A couple years ago, a librarian in the district of the school where I taught back then, Blackhawk High (WI), asked me to come to her library and talk about writing. I did—and I didn’t. I went, but I didn’t talk about writing because the place was full of my old students fifty years later, the guys as pot-bellied as their teacher.

We had a great time, a memorable night of my life. I loved it.

One story got told, a story everyone remembered, even me, even though I had not seen exactly what happened, as many of them had. I simply caught their shock.

I left a piece of my heart there in Lafayette County, Wisconsin, but only once did I dig back into those two years for a story I never did—or ever would—forget.

Sometimes the delicate narratives of a story are drawn surgically from everyday life. Sometimes, I knew, those plot lines originated in the storyteller. “The Whiz” is a narrative that still lives in the memories of all those students who were there, as well as their first or second-year teacher.

In writing classes, I used to talk about writing as “a way of knowing,” meaning that spending words and ideas on a blank page was itself an exercise in discovery. A thousand writers have said how it is that they really didn’t know what they thought about something —a character, a setting, or a conflict—until they wrote about it. Writing is a way of learning, a way of knowing.

The givens of “The Whiz” are drawn straight out of my earliest teaching experience, a series of events no kid from BHHS, class of 1972, would ever forget.

The story wasn’t difficult to write. My part in what happened that afternoon was, however, something I would say I’m still discovering.

The “I” of this story, the narrator, is not me—the lines on the page are still spoken by a fictional narrator. That having been said, there’s not much difference between the two of us. Sometimes the likeness is embarrassingly close.

_________________

"The Whiz" appeared twice here, if you're interested. It began March 15, 2019, and then again on June 14, 2023.

August Morning on the Little Rock

This morning--emphasis on this--comes from August of 2011, long, long ago. Most people in the neighborhood would recognize from this title slide--I don't know what I was making--that the Little Rock is a river you cross when you go north to Rock Rapids. What drew me to that locale is a mystery. It wasn't one of my usual Saturday-dawn haunts, not even close. I'd guess that--unfamiliarity--may have been motivation.

I spent some time trying to get this single tree on a bit of a hill because the morning sky is such a delight. The heavens put on quite a show.

But that solitary tree didn't offer a view of the river, which is what I'm sure I wanted that morning. I had to get that up the road a bit, when most of the breathtaking color was routed by the sun.

One of my favorites from this morning is a shot of a herd of cattle in a pasture, something of an oddity in the region. To catch them out like this is a treat. Most livestock in this county full of 'em are confined. You could ride down gravel roads all day and not see a pig, even though there are literally millions of them in Sioux County. There remains something spiritual about "the cattle on a thousand hills."

I stumbled on this guy just before I left. He appears to be in full control, oblivious to the humanoid toting a camera. Looks to be a red-tailed hawk--or maybe a young bald eagle, although 15 years ago there weren't that many bald eagles around yet.

I remember going home that morning, thinking there were some nice shots on that memory card. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer”

Yesterday, I mowed my lawn. I thought it would be a quick job because I’d done it less than week before. I am not one of those Dutch folk who believe that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is found somewhere in Leviticus. But in summer, when I spend hours and hours in the basement clicking computer keys, come mid- to late afternoon I love to get outside and do some honest, sweaty labor in the vineyard of our backyard, where we don’t, of course, have a vineyard.

Yesterday, the grass out front was long enough to call in the sheep. So I mowed, and the clippings—our yard is thick with maple seed whirlybirds right now—filled up the bed of my son-in-law’s big pick-up. The rainfall this spring has been magnificent.

By late July, I likely won’t be able to walk barefoot on my grass because what’s left will be yellowed cactus points. By July, I’ll cut the lawn once every three weeks at best, and then mostly weeds, the only verdure that prospers once the rains stop.

Only once in the near thirty years that I’ve lived here have I seen a black cloud rolling in, a storm of dust. Only once. But that day I won’t forget because it prompted fear from a memory I don’t have—a vision from the Dust Bowl that turned prairie into the Sahara not all that far west from here.

By November, 1933, dust storms had roared by for years already, in the middle of a drought that went on for ten years. People were actually accustomed to hacking up mud from their throats, to enclosing drinking water in Mason jars to keep it from turning brown, even in the house, to knead bread inside drawers drawn just wide enough to allow their hands inside.

But what came on Armistice Day that November was like nothing else.

In 1923, about two hours northwest of here, a man named A. Karstrom retired and went to town, leaving his son the 470-acre spread that made Mr. Karstrom a good living. What followed was thirteen progressively bad years and the Black Blizzard, which broke his son’s heart and back, the air an image of midnight. In the heat and dust, the farm blew away. Four years later, a new owner took over a place that hadn’t been lived and moved five tons of sand from the acreage. Five tons. That’s how dry it was just northwest of here in 1933. That’s how lifeless.

The NIV, in verse four, holds on to a bit of what the KJV used to say. “My moisture is turned into the drought of summer” has been changed to “my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Sapped is the link, as if the sap, the fluid, of David’s soul has dried up by the torturous heat of his own sin and misery. What’s in him is drought, dust. When he looks up from his anguish, all he sees is a black blizzard.

His spirit and strength is as lifeless as that Karstrom farm. Even if the weather turns, he can’t move in the tons of choking dust that rises in his heart and throat.

What he needs is someone to carry away all those tons of dust, to bring him back, to refresh him with living water.

And that’s the story of Psalm 32, his story and ours. Black blizzards turned miraculously verdant by the living water of God’s own forgiveness. That’s the story all right.          

Country Schools*

Poor things haven't seen a kid in years. They don't look as depressed as they are simply desolated, where they still exist at all. Sure, some people live in them these days, having turned them into homes; but most are long gone--the old one-room schools. Here one stands out in the country, empty of kids, empty of soul. 

I feel a little guilty snapping a picture, having caught the old place so out of sorts. It's like coming up on a dead body along the road. There's a face here somehow, or am I dreaming? It seems an act of mercy to take the color out. I don't know why, but black and white bestows at least some vagrant dignity. 

Once they were ubiquitous, hard as that it to believe. Here's the Carmel, Iowa, area, circa 1908. Ye olde Atlas claims six of these schools existed in what amounts to six square miles. Look for yourself.

Once they were greatly welcoming, I'm sure. Farms were much smaller; families were much bigger. Many more kids meant more rural schools. All six of these are long gone now, but then so are most of the kids.

My mother taught in one of these places long, long ago, mid-thirties or so, when she was a young thing just out of normal school, too young at times to handle big farm boys who walked through doors like this only occasionally, when they weren't cultivating or helping out with spring planting. I remember Mom telling me that some of the boys she had in Lakeview country school were almost her age and somewhat fearfully bigger than she was. She remembered letting one of them drive her car, some fellow named LeRoy Fritsch, long dead, I imagine. She used to shake her head in disbelief when she remembered letting him do that. I'm sure she was taken with him somehow. I've been a teacher myself.

And once upon a time, in a school just like Hoff District 80 my mother said she was having a good day, mid-winter, when in the middle of a lesson to one grade or another, something started rolling up the hardwood floor from the back, making the kind of hollow noise that edged itself into distraction. She didn't remember what she was teaching, but she remembered hearing the empty noise then seeing a marble, one of those big ones--didn't people used to call them "shooters"?--big as a chestnut.

Like I was saying, a place like this, just such a place.

She was busy with some of the others--a school like this included all eight grades--and I know she was deeply invested in whatever it was she was doing. People say she was a great teacher, and I believe it. Anyway, there she was, mid-winter, in the middle of school a half mile from Lake Michigan with a bunch of tough farm kids when a big marble came rolling up on the wooden floor. I've always thought it was LeRoy Fritsch who did it.

Without thinking, book in hand, she reached down and picked it up. It was, she said, so shockingly red hot that it seared her fingers because it had been heated on the potbelly stove. My mother rarely used bad language, but that moment could well have been one of those times when refraining was out of the question. 

Whatever she said or did at that moment, the pain and shock and disrespect never really left. Nor did it leave her son, who heard the story when he was just a little boy who loved his mom. 

I think I hated LeRoy Fritsch for most of my life, even though I never met him. Old childhood hate that keeps the name alive after all these years and both of their deaths.

You can't help thinking about it when you stand out there beside what few of these still exist--that once upon a time a place like this was full of stories, full of life.

_________________

*  Rpt from March 6, 2015, when there were, I'm sure, more than a few of these abandoned schoolhouses in the country and neighborhood.

How am I doing? Still learning. . .

That's me way over there sitting on a chair against the far wall. You're looking at the Dutch American History Museum (DAHM) in Orange City, a great place that houses a wonderful collection of Native American artifacts. For about ten years I served on the board of the museum and did numerous tours through the museum--and its Indigenous section. Health reasons prompted me to back away, and I did at about the same time the DAHM took in sufficient funding to hire a part-time administrator. 

A week ago or so, she asked me to come to museum and do a tour of the Native side of the DAHM. A goodly number of people from Landsmeer would be coming in, and she wanted me to be the docent. I told her I would--I'd be in Orange City anyway for an appointment at the hospital. I could stop by at just about the time I'd be going home. 

When people ask me how I'm doing these days, I tell them it's a difficult question to answer. If I just say good and they watch me take a step or two, with cane or walker, the image belies the facts. On the other hand, there are 78-year-olds all over who I'm sure would swap conditions. I'm doing okay, but I'm not going out for a spot on the defensive front-four. I'm doing okay, but, my goodness, how I'd love to walk a hundred yards without having to find a place to sit.

So anyway we do a little ritual lately when something like a museum visit comes along. I ask Barbara--"take the cane or the walker"? Most often she says "walker" because she knows, as do I, that the worst possible scenario is me falling, something more likely happen with the cane than the cart. 

I took the cane. Doesn't make me look so fragile, so old.

Once I got through the urologist's fun questions at OC hospital, I got in the car and went to the museum, armed with the cane. 

When our guests showed up--the firsts half of them anyway--as you might have guessed, a ton of them were using a walker. All of the first half. Every one. Not a cane in the bunch. The museum was awash with walkers, and mine was home because, because why? it suggests weakness.

I'm doing okay, all right? If you see me around, you may ask me how I'm doing, but I'll do you the favor of letting you know right now--if you ask, I'll tell you "I'm doing okay--as long as I got the walker."