The Petersons trip to Dallas

The Petersons and Bono

The man's knowledge of the Bible was absolutely exhaustive. No one can plumb scripture's depths fully, but Eugene Peterson had gone through it, word by word, to create a new translation in an attempt to catch the Bible's wondrous exuberance, its very life. Thousands--well, 17 million around the world--were greatly pleased by The Message.

One of those readers called Eugene and Jan one day, a man who apparently had only one name, a man who introduced himself as Bono from a music group called U2. The name rang a bell--Eugene had been told by his students that Bono had mentioned him in an interview in Rolling Stone. But did they know this man?--hardly--they barely knew of him. And then this Bono fellow told them he'd like to talk to them and have them as special guests at a concert of his.

First, Eugene turned him down, actually turned him down. He had deadlines, after all. . .

When Bono tried again, he told them he'd fly them down to Dallas, where U2 was performing, because he'd like to spend some time with them. He'd read The Message and wanted to talk about it and to thank the Petersons, personally, for doing it. 

This time they consented. I heard the story from the Petersons when they told it at a small gathering of writers, told it with sheer joy coupled with some significant helpings of embarrassment that they really hadn't heard much about this man with the single name, didn't recognize him, and, they admitted, didn't spend much time at all with Bono's own special brand of contemporary music.

Let me just add that Eugene Peterson, a man who sold millions of books, was accomplished at humility. The real story of the Petersons and Bono was, to them, how absurdly unprepared they were to understand what was going on around them--Montana Yankees in King Bono's Court. It was a hoot.

In fact, they said, to say they enjoyed the concert would be stretching truth, although once they'd begun to listen a bit to U2, they said, they'd grown in appreciation. But the concert was really loud, much louder than the classical stuff that played at their cabin in the Montana mountains. 

To be sure, Bono himself they loved. They enjoyed him, were impressed by his candor about faith, by his commitment. By the time they got on a plane for Dallas, they knew that in a world larger than their own, Bono was a celebrity for all kinds of good reasons.                             

I was a part of this small group of writers, the Chrysostom Society, for 20 years maybe, but the night that the Petersons gleefully told the story about their trip to a Bono concert the whole bunch of us were in stitches. The story--and their telling of it-- was both hilarious and sweet, and a comfort really, the faith of the giant rocker itself a testimony of grace.

The new Christianity Today (March, 2023) arrived in the mailbox yesterday. I must admit I didn't read much of the December, 2022 issue, which featured an interview with Bono. But in a short piece introducing the letters the magazine received, senior editor Kate Lucky claims "Some readers expressed gratitude for the rocker's reflections, reminiscing about how his music shaped their faith through car radios and stadium concerts. Then she quoted from a reader who said he admired Bono's "hope in Christ" and "how [Bono] considers himself a pilgrim. . .rather than someone who considers himself to have arrived."

But there were other letters too, she explained: ". . .several readers . . .were troubled by the profile's omissions--mostly Bono's positions on abortion and LGBT issues." Apparently, those readers have arrived.

It seems to me that it was Ann Lamott who said, the opposite of faith is certitude.

Is it any wonder why people leave a church that can't begin to reconcile its own?

___________________

A twenty-minute video about the Petersons visit with Bono is worth watching if you don't know the story. 

Yancey's own story about grace

I read Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace? during a three-week stint I spent in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The question mark at the end of the sentence may well make the question itself rhetorical because with the publication of that book Yancey's reputation as a writer, already handsomely established, became even more set in stone, in rock, the rock of ages. He was and is, as a writer, someone who with trusted honesty has more than his share of trouble believing in grace, as most of us do. 

It's free, a gift. Meticulous lives don't earn it because it's given away. Seriously. "Human beings love free things," an old pastor used to say, "except salvation--salvation is something all of us really want to earn." 

I read Amazing first, then Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, a one/two punch that may sound as if I was on some kind of grace kick, which I wasn't. In a way, you might say, those two books were my morning prayers, wonderful devotional literature. I picked up Yancey's book because I had spent some considerable time with him in a small Christian writers group, the Chrysostom Society, where I'd heard Yancey read from the manuscript before it was published. I knew I'd like it.

Norris's Amazing Grace I came to after reading Dakota, her book about the plains, a book that, like no other I knew, measured and described the region and its people with a forthright honesty--and grace--that's almost shocking because it felt to me so true to life. 

What's not so amazing was that I loved both books. In fact, the two of them tag-teamed me into submission on a manuscript I was working over--a novel titled Romey's Place. There I was in a tiny little student apartment in Amsterdam, Holland, looking out a window at suburban neighborhood when I told myself I had the ending of that novel all wrong, completely wrong, because the story I was inventing, creating, was in actuality a story about grace. 

I've never been big on "The Lord told me to write this." But it's impossible not to believe in epiphanies, and that day I had a healthy one, life-changing in a limited way. I have no doubt that I understood grace before reading those books, but the those two books battered me into accepting, once again, the truly amazing character of grace. I went home dutified, I'd say--I was going to rewrite the whole blame thing once more. And I did.

The times I'd spent in Yancey's company gave me an outline of his biography. I knew he was raised in the South, that for some time he'd bought the racist line of so many white evangelicals, who, even as I was taught, considered the African race as descendants of Ham, the son of Noah determined by God Almighty to be servant/slaves. Isn't that what the Bible says? Somehow, "the theory of Ham" made slavery--or at least prejudice-- biblical, which is why Huck said he'd rather go to hell than give up Jim.

The burden Phillip Yancey needed lifted from his soul was hefty because he'd grown up in a church that publicly and powerfully determined, as a body, it would never have African American members, a decision documented by cartoonish biblical footnotes. 

What I didn't know was that he grew up in fatherless home, that his mother had taken her husband, Phillip's father, out of the iron lung he'd been in, a victim of the polio epidemic of mid-20th century. She released him from the horrific bondage of the iron lung by determining that it was her lack of faith that kept him there. She believed she and her prayer warriors could pray him back to health.

Didn't happen. Thus, Philip Yancey grew up without a father and with that mother, who became a world-class Sunday School teacher, but a demonically abusive parent. His mother was a victim of the kind of faith-madness somewhat familiar to most of us who've grown up steeped in evangelical culture, where men and women can somehow be both grotesquely pious and insufferably abusive. 

Like Tara Westover's Educated, Yancey's story is so full of abuse that it's painful. His mother, a renowned Bible school teacher who spent her summers in Bible camps, tortured her sons--not physically, but emotionally and, yes, spiritually. On the memoir shelf, Where the Light Fell fits quite snugly beside Tara Westover's Educated and Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, stories of similarly grinding and grotesque abuse. 

I couldn't help thinking that Westover's Educated wasn't finished, that she wrote the book before she'd adequately "processed" the horrors her father had made of her childhood. Vance was more interested in delineating the roots of the Trump phenomenon. But Yancey's Where the Light Fell is different. It's disarmingly honest about his inability to assess his mother's place in his life, not because he doesn't have the goods on her--he does!!--but because he somehow, some way, still loves her, not as a human being, but as his mother. 

And that's grace, although I'm quite sure Philip wouldn't like me saying it in just that way.

I remember him saying once, years ago, that he somehow wished he could write something other than what he seemed predestined to do, books that bash the evangelicals from whom he'd descended and, ironically, who became his most devoted readers. 

Maybe Where the Light Fell is Philip Yancey's best book because it's his story, his personal story, a story that tries not to let the abuse grab all the headlines. The honesty of his wounded soul allows him the freedom to tell the story, but the grace he's learned in a lifetime of trying to understand it's "amazing" character won't let him leave his mother behind. He won't write her off, even though, in essence, that's what she did to her husband, his father, when she took him out of the iron lung. And what she did to her boys.

Yancey shakes his head at his assessment of his mother's influence and wishes on the final pages that he could do something more Kum-by-ya. He describes what she has done in unflinching honesty, yet refuses forsake her. 

No question mark here because that's what's so amazing about grace.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

 

“…establish the work of our hands for us—

yes, establish the work of our hands.”

The bike path east of town cuts diagonally through tall fields of corn that sometimes buffer prairie winds and sometimes channel it. In July, when the temperature is at 100 degrees, that narrow corridor is a wind tunnel. Back when I used it daily, I fought prairie winds all the way down, then sailed along when I came back to town.

Really dry corn makes all kinds of noise. Its leaves get stiff and curl up lengthwise, then crack against each when they get bullied by wind. I’ve never been a farmer, but I’ve lived beside 12-foot corn most of my life, and I know when to get worried. Back then we hadn’t had rain for far too long. Weeks before already, I stopped mowing when our lawn turned to toast. From a distance that section of corn along the bike path still looked emerald, but up close it was smacking and cracking.

The man who planted that particular tall corn corridor died that summer. My wife told me about his death weeks after it occurred. I’d missed it myself. Had I known, I would have gone to the funeral. Once, years ago, that man told me I ought to write a book about his life. I should have, but never did.

Cantankerous and quarrelsome, his life deserved a story. We’ll call him LeRoy and protect his memory, not because he was ever an innocent. His wife left him after a couple decades of what must have been horror. For a time, fistfights with his son were public spectacles. Once, a neighbor’s sow wandered on his yard, and LeRoy shot it dead, then called the neighbor to pick it up. That afternoon, the neighbor called the radio station to nominate LeRoy for “Good Neighbor of the Day.” The whole town laughed when he awarded the distinction.

For a time, LeRoy went to the same church we did. A friend of mine told his buddy, a Lutheran, that our church would pay for their new building project if the Lutherans would take LeRoy off our hands in the bargain.

Thanks but no thanks, the Lutheran said.

There’s more. Lots more. There should have been a book. He was never a saint. Some considered him a crackpot. Worse.

Later in his life, he mellowed, thank the Lord. I’m sure there were moments when he wished he hadn’t been what he was.

The day I heard that Leroy died I took that bike path east of town in withering heat and felt his absence because it bothered me, strangely enough, that there was no one around to worry about his corn. LeRoy would have, but he couldn’t, and he wasn’t.

I felt somehow responsible, if that makes sense. LeRoy always liked me; I’m not sure why. He didn’t like a lot of people, and he wasn’t shy about preferences. When I rode my bike through that tunnel of tall corn and heard its leaves cracking, I felt sad because I told myself he ought to be there to worry, like all farmers do.

As all of us do—about a bunch of things. When it comes to worry, most of us have fields of too dry corn.

I’ve got no crops to worry about, no cattle to feed. But I’ve got my concerns.

Like Moses, and like LeRoy, I’m sure, I often pray that God almighty will establish the works of my hands—establish these very words I’m typing. Don’t let ‘em dry in the hot sun. Keep ‘em growing and keep ‘em green, even in the heat. Make ‘em better than they are.

Moses’s agonizing concern arises from a heart estranged, someone whose thirsty soul has been languishing in the eerie darkness of an eclipse, God himself hidden. What Moses is asking for is that what he does with his hands in that wilderness where his people are serving a sentence, what he does from day-to-day, his work, his toil, his care—that all of that is blest. That’s all he wants, as do most of us. Bless it, Lord.

What he wants is nothing but good corn to feed a hungry world, something to flower gloriously from a cracked pot.

Morning Thanks--the warmest warm

Gilson Bros. 1946*

I'm not sure exactly how cold it was yesterday, in the wake of a much ballyhooed storm that never quite lived up to its billing. I'm not sure how much snow we got either, although the land looked especially royal yesterday, in the storm's wake, billowing robes of ermine as far as you could see. How bad? How beautiful? 

In the season of "farch," nothing winterish is as grandiose as it seemed in early December. Early winter blizzards are always romantic. In March, no matter how gorgeous, they don't register similarly. 

A short walk from the truck to the gym requires wool layering to fight a fierce northwester blowing straight from somewhere abominable.

Which reminds me of Jim Daane, a man long, long gone from this cold world, a man who worked in the office of a factory run by Gilson Brothers, in Oostburg, Wisconsin. I don't remember much about him, although his son was my sister's age. If I ever heard him say a word, I don't remember the instance. I think of him as slightly stooped and ready with humor; but I may be wrong.

What I've never forgotten was something my dad claimed Jim Daane told him, long, long ago. On some cold winter morning, Jim Daane told Dad, "There's nothing quite as warm as getting back into bed with the wife." 

Dad loved that line. I suppose I remember it because of his joy, not only remembering it but knowing, first hand, the same joy himself on cold mornings. Just exactly how either of them could rediscover that warmth isn't clear all these years later. I don't think Gilson Bros. would have taken kindly to its workers taking advantage of the warmest of all warms and leaving the foundry to get there portion. I don't remember my dad suddenly showing up and running upstairs to get his batteries charged. 

But I think of the line often in the cold of winter myself. It comes back to me, second-hand of course, with my dad's co-signature. Thought of it this morning again, in fact, when I sat up in bed and told myself it was time for me to go downstairs.

It's dark outside my big window, dark and cold, although I believe the wind is negligible right now. What I know is this--the quicker I finish this up, the sooner I can catch a bit of that better-than-anything warmth so celebrated by a man I can identify by only one perfectly beloved line, an office guy at Gilson, a guy I never knew. 

What I know is that Jim Daane nailed it.

This morning's thanks is for that blessed warmth I'm about to rediscover. 

__________________ 

For the record, my dad is on the ground, second from right. Jim Daane is standing, far left, last row.

Shady work for the big lie

AG Mark Brnovich

It's an understandably human horror story.

In 2021, the then-Attorney General of the state of Arizona, Mark Brnovich, deliberately withheld a study his office originated and carried out, choosing not to release the findings to the public. (Don't giggle, but you may remember that weird mighty ninja voting outfit AZ Republicans used to verify the 2020 election results.)  

Now Arizona ranks as ground-zero in America's political divides, home to Kari Lake, who still maintains her victory in the state's governor's race. The Arizona desert is a real MAGA hotbed. Ordinary human beings there go ballistic about "voter fraud." The state was--and remains--seething, first because the AG's early (but correct) call that Joe Biden had won the state; and second because a mob of true believers bought the allegation that voter fraud had most certainly had occurred in Maricopa County, where about half the voters in the state reside.

So the Arizona AG directed a study, but then sat on the results rather than release them to the public. What that study showed was that there was no voter fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona, that election officials were not crooked or undercover libs, but public servants doing their job with patience and care in the face of vicious vilification from the mega-intolerance of the MAGA world.

That he didn't release the findings of his own office's study isn't criminal--he didn't have to release any findings about anything--but his not letting the public know, most certainly, is reprehensible.

Among the Don's disciples, I don't know that anything would--or will--tarnish the view that the Orange Man got screwed in the 2020 Presidential election. Trump can do no wrong among his loyalists. But his perpetuation of "the big lie" has fractured the body politic in this nation more painfully in the last two years. That "big lie" might well have seemed less so, at least to some Republicans, had they seen the report the Arizona AG's office undertook and completed. NO VOTER FRAUD.

That he sat on the study may not be a crime, but certainly courts "malfeasance of office."

The human story starts with the fact that Mark Brnovich didn't want another term at AZ's AG. What he really wanted was to go to Washington as Arizona's newest Republican senator. So, while he had to know that sitting on that report would pour salt in the MAGA mob's political mood, he also had to understand that laying a wet blanket over the blazes on the right would jeopardize his Senate candidacy. He'd already been called a RINO. Trump himself disowned him for calling Arizona's election results as early as he did.

As a result, Brnovich got "primaried," as they say, and lost, big time, to a MAGA man.

Mark Brnovich likely determined that he'd already leaned left. He may have figured that releasing the report would do little to change minds locked in to the Big Lie. About that, he may have been right.

Still, when good people do bad things, we all suffer. By not releasing a clearly objective investigative report about voter fraud in Maricopa County, Mark Brnovich served up more Big Lie poison.

Will he go to jail? I doubt it. He broke no law.

Meanwhile, it may be February, but the Arizona desert is still burning.

The story of January Thaw

 Just in case you can't read it, the stone, very clearly, says this:

We Shall Meet Again (beneath clasped hands)

Jennie

wife of 

Gerrit Van Engen

born

Sept. 15,1899

Died 

Dec. 6, 1920

One early morning 17 years ago I was out in the Doon cemetery and literally bumped into this stone. I think I'm safe in saying that most Van Engens in the neighborhood wouldn't know the story behind her early death (at 21 years), but in an instant I was sure I did because Frederick Manfred, the novelist, had this way of disguising names, especially of those people he wanted to commend, as he did a cousin of his, Gerrit Van Engen. The entire Van Engen clan he renamed Van Engleking (or something similar).

So named, Gerrit Van Engleking, a marvelous ball player who could have played in the bigs if he'd been able to play on Sunday (according to his novelist cousin), was as handy with women as he was with a baseball. In the novel The Secret Place (also titled The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales), this Gerrit, who cannot keep his hankering to home, gets two young women pregnant. Both die--one of shame (she refuses to acknowledge her pregnancy), the other in childbirth.

And now you might just see where this is going--or where the whole story I've been posting (including the last two installments, initially, in the wrong order) originates. The Secret Place didn't win Manfred any bright and shiny literary awards, but it made me think I could write. No single piece of writing was so significant in developing my desire to sit here and watch the words appear on the screen before me than Frederick Manfred's The Secret Place. 

Why? Because I told myself I somehow knew these characters. Not literally, of course, but emotionally. I grew up in a church that made a practice of public shaming for sexually active men and (mostly) women. I remember the young woman who stood in the front of the church, alone, and confessed her sin. I wasn't much more than a child. Somewhere in my own consciousness, I knew Jennie Van Engen.

Quite by accident, I noticed the stone and realized, oddly enough, that in all likelihood, I may well have been, right then and there, the only person on earth who knew Jennie's story. I knew her because I knew him--Frederick Manfred, whose grave stands no more a stone's throw away.

And that proximity made me wonder what might happen on some moonlit night up on the hill above Doon, Iowa, when the residents of the town's graveyard appeared to chat, to visit, to have coffee with each other, citizens of the Doon cemetery spirit world. 

That's the story of the story. Once my imagination invested itself in the scenario, I wrote a number of other stories drawn from an imaginary cemetery, put them together in a collection named Up the Hill: Folk Tales from the Grave (available on Amazon, just click here :)).

I'm so sorry about getting the order wrong. I knew I wouldn't be able to keep the blog up without resorting to some fiction, so I picked out "January Thaw" because right now, along with the DAHM winter book club, we're reading Lord Grizzly, Manfred's most celebrated novel, the story of Hugh Glass and his remarkable will to live. 

But that's another story. Hope you enjoyed "January Thaw."  

January Thaw -- vi

Strangely, the two of them are of great interest now as they walk between the stones, avoiding the scattered snow drifts. They are not alone. Eyes galore are watching them. Even though he sees no one, she knows that everywhere in the neighborhood people see them together, people who also have things to say to him.

“There are more,” she tells him. “I’m not alone here.” She gestures with her arm as if there is a cloud of witnesses nearby. “Lots of ghosts around here,” she says, making a joke. She is, after all, something of a girl.

“Others?” he says.

“Lots of them will have something to say,” she tells him. “You have some explaining to do.” She squeezes his arm. “But there will be time.”

“I had no idea,” he says. “When I chose this plot, it seemed right to be where I was born and reared. When I was a boy, I looked over these fields and wanted to tell their stories.”

“It was a good decision,” she tells him. “To come here—it was a good decision.”

It’s not far, the distance from his grave to hers.

“This is yours,” he says when they come to her stone, unusually tall in this old part of the graveyard.

“Have you thought of your mother?” she asks him because she has—and often. They all have. None of them had heard from her since he came, and they’d missed her. She’d left into silence.

He hadn’t thought of her, of course. How could he? This young woman was the first who’d spoken to him. His mother? How could he think of such a thing? “She’s here?” he says. He knows where her stone stands, of course, so he turns east quickly.

“You were thinking somewhere else maybe?” she says. “You know better.”

They’re still arm-in-arm, but as if by instinct, in fear, he takes her hand. “I haven’t seen her,” he says.

“That doesn’t mean she’s not here,” she says. “We’re not yours, you know,” she tells him. “You thought so for a long time, but we have our own lives, so to speak.”

“She could have come by?” he asks. “Like you have—she could have come?” He looks back to his own stone and turns around as if to authenticate that it’s not all that far; the neighborhood isn’t all that large.

“You forget most of us here had minor roles. I was dead in what—fifty pages, no more?” She wraps her hand around his. “She’s in everything you wrote,” she tells him. “What’s more, she’s your mother.”

“I was too young when she died,” he says.

“We all know that,” she tells him.

Just behind Jennie’s stone, they’re standing on bare ground beside a tall pine that’s rustling in a soft wind, unusually warm for January, a wind that is reaching up from the south, creating the only sound around them.

“You’ll find us all more forgiving than we were,” she tells him. “Your mother too, although I don’t have to tell you that she always was a saint.”

He nods. “Can I speak to her?”

“There will be more now who want to talk to you—we are a community after all, and always were,” she tells him.

“I’ll have to wait?” he asks and she nods.

And I like to believe that had I been there just then, at that moment, middle of the night, January thaw, cold and crisp and bright, I would have seen them together right there at Jennie’s stone. “1899,” it says, and “1920,” and then, “We shall meet again.”

They are lovers in a sense he never dreamed, the two of them standing together in the cemetery above the town, arm in arm, hand in hand, in a fine and secret place, if not an Eden, amid a gathering of hundreds of shadows, maybe more, emerging from the moonlit stones all around.

A story born in a graveyard, a story no one knows but me.

________________ 

Tomorrow: the story of "January Thaw."

January Thaw -- v

“You don’t even know,” she says, but there’s a gracious, soft smile on her lips. “You remember every detail of how you described it between Garrett and me, up here at this secret place, don’t you? You told the world. You took me here,” and she has to reach for words now, “—and all I’m asking of you is my name,” she says again, but not angrily. She’s not after revenge—that’s not it. And even he knows it; he feels it in the pitch of her words. “To you I was a character, that’s all. Do you know how that feels?” And then again, “Tell me my name.”

It’s difficult for him to look into her eyes, which is to say into her soul, so he pulls a hand up across his face as if something is there to wipe away.

Seconds pass. A minute. Two minutes. Her waiting is relentless.

There are no cars coming up the road to the cemetery. Somewhere far away, a coyote. He knows he could stand here forever and not remember because it is no longer in the vault of his memory. He remembers exactly how he created her story, where he was sitting, how he walked around the room, how careful he was with the details, how hard he worked to get it right, how the next morning he went over and over it again, that lovemaking in this secret place.

He looks up to see she’s still waiting.

“You don’t remember,” she says. Her shoulders drop. “Admit it. You don’t know me at all. You don’t even know my name.” She is turning him in her hands. She can.

There have been moments in his life when deep regret pitched up against the sheer force of his indomitable will, moments he doesn’t want to remember. But it’s still hard for him. Her will is immense. He knows the silence she’s created here and now, outside of time, could go on for days, and he doesn’t know her name.

And all the while he’s standing there frozen, his face empty, the smile on hers grows seemingly more considerate because she knows she has forever. She feels no need to speak. It wasn’t how she’d planned it—what she might say, how they might talk—because she never guessed he wouldn’t remember her name, not after what he’d done, how much he’d written. But they have arrived where she wanted to take him, where, she might have said, she needed to, for his sake, and hers too, maybe. But then she wasn’t thinking of herself. Credit her this: she’s been in the neighborhood for years and years, and even though time is immaterial—and maybe because it is—there’s grace in this woman’s spirit and no more spite.

That’s why, just then, in his silence, she steps closer.

Nothing is said. She remembers that he had given her a life that she might not have had—he wasn’t wrong. People sometimes drive up to the cemetery, get out of the car, and walk to her grave; and she knows—she simply understands—that when they stand there and read the words her husband had carved in the stone—“Wife of Garret Van Engen,” words that were somewhat too shadowy with mildew now—when people stand there, people she doesn’t recognize, no blood relatives, she understands they are there because of him, because of what he had done.

It is 75 years since she’d died becoming the mother she never would be, and in that time she’d come to understand that if it weren’t for this man, few, if any, would ever pause before the stone the way some visitors still do. In those first years, people stopped often, some of them—women—even crying, her folks, full of regret for the way they’d handled everything now that their daughter was gone. Her father had come for years, but that was behind her now, and he was here, too. But then, fewer and fewer had come, her husband gone away, buried elsewhere; no one but strangers ever stand before her stone. What she’d come to understand was not so much that he had given her life—only God could do that—as prolonged it, even if the facts weren’t square and what he’d written was more than he should have. He had their love right, she told herself. That much he’d had right after all. It was strange. Maybe she was more a part of his secret place than she’d ever been in life itself, a place he’d created.

Bravely, he looked up at her once again, but still without the name she wanted. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s been so very long.”

“You can’t use that one here,” she tells him, and she comes even closer to him. Once again, she brings her hands up to his elbows, then pulls herself near him, has him, this big man, in her grasp. “You really don’t know, do you?”

He has to force himself to look into her eyes, and he’s struck by the fact that there is nothing menacing there. He shakes his head.

“Not even a guess?” she asks.

What he sees in her eyes is something he doesn’t remember ever seeing before, something it takes him some time to understand. It’s shocking in it guilelessness, and it seems to him like nothing human he’d ever seen. He remembers, as a boy, being told about it, what it might be; but it’s taken his death for him to see it for real, if this can be said to be real. And because there seems no anger, he opens himself in a way hadn’t, this writer who for so many years opened himself to his readers. “I don’t remember your name,” he says. “I’m an old man, and I don’t know it, and I’m so very sorry.”

She’s been holding him at the elbows, but with those words her small arms circle his broad chest and she holds him tenderly as a lover, not a lover in any sense he might remember either, but a lover that is, as she is, not of this world.

“It’s not June,” she tells him, pulling back again. She tightens her lips, stares. “That’s a beautiful name, and I wish it had been mine, but it’s not. My name was Jennie.” She backs away slightly, let’s his arms go for a moment, then reaches for an elbow again and gently pulls him with her. “Let me show you,” she says.

For the first time, he smiles. “It’s not that,” he says, “I know where you are. I remember your stone—when it was new. I used to come here. As a boy, I used to come here.”

She takes his hand, and the two of them walk back from the fence line into the center of things, from the far reaches of the northwest corner. She pulls her hand away for a moment and then pushes her arm into his, and he takes it as a gentleman would.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“You sweep men away in the sleep of death;. . .”

This morning's text brings back the story of Kenneth Lay, the disgraced CEO of Enron, an energy company that did little more than lay pipeline until Lay turned it into an immense multi-national conglomerate, over 100 billion in annual revenues and number seven on the Fortune 500 in 2000. Listen to this: in 2001 Ken Lay gave away--gave away!-- $6.1 million. That’s wealth.

But his successes took a tragic turn with the collapse of the huge energy company he’d helped create. Corruption found its way into the inner sanctum of Enron, and the company staggered and fell, first to its knees, then flat on its face, taking the dreams and financial futures of many thousands with it into oblivion.

 
It took several years for investigators to unravel the origins and the paths of the corruption, but from early on it was clear that Lay’s innocence—he claimed as much—was going to be difficult to prove. His was, after all, the desk where the buck stopped. 

 Eventually a jury convicted Kenneth Lay, friend of Presidents, Houston’s most blessed philanthropist, of fraud and conspiracy for lying to employees and stock holders.

Nonetheless, his story is the great American dream. Born into poverty in Missouri, he rose by his bootstraps to the shining pinnacle of corporate America. A note he sent to George W. Bush in 1998, on the occasion of Bush’s capturing the Texas Governorship, makes clear his relationship: “Please have your team let me know what Enron can do to be helpful in not only passing electricity restructuring legislation but also in pursuing the rest of your legislative agenda.” And then, penciled in beneath the type: “George—Linda and I are incredibly proud of you and Laura.” And finally, “Ken.” 

Sounds almost like a father.

 
Few on earthlings held Ken Lay’s power during the glory years at Enron. Few fell so far, so fast. Today, his name is synonymous with greed and graft, the quintessential white-collar criminal. Years later, late-night comedians still cut him up.

And then, not long after his sentencing but before any jail time, remarkably, he died; the autopsy said heart disease. Those who’ve followed the story—me included—felt somehow robbed because there should have been more before the story ended. We should have seen him in an orange jumpsuit, trucked off to prison; we needed to hear the clang of a dead bolt. We needed to feel justice.

But he died, fell over dead on a vacation, of all things, in Aspen, Colorado. It just wasn’t right. Those of us who are believers would like to see something else come out of this whole sordid tale—a confession of sin, maybe. Ken Lay toted a Bible to church every Sunday of his life, taught Sunday school for years. A frequently combative and seemingly arrogant defendant during his six-month trial, Lay should have had time to make amends, to make peace, to show us redemption. Honestly, I still feel as if the story can’t be over. We’re nowhere near denouement.

But dead men tell no tales, and now he’s long gone. His family still misses him, I’m sure, but also must feel some relief. Conspiracy theorists will never believe “heart disease.”

 
Kenneth Lay was “swept away in the sleep of death,” just exactly as the Psalm say. 

But this line from Psalm 90 is not solely about a financier named Ken Lay. It’s about us too, this bell tolling. . .

Hear it?

January Thaw --iv

 The cemetery lies a mile or so west of town, up on a bluff above the river. The view is extraordinary, the town down there beneath them, streetlights like a string of pearls in the midnight darkness, now and then a car. Occasionally, one of them comes up the road from town, driving west. The tires sing a higher pitch as they cross the bridge, but most of the time—everyone remembers the exceptions—those cars just keep going, especially at night. No one in the neighborhood hides as they pass, but then no one is afraid. Why should they be?

She knows she needs more from him. “What makes you think you know what happened—between Garrett and me, I mean?” she asks. She turns to face him, not because she’d planned it that way but because she wants him to answer her, not evade. “What makes you think you can create all of that out of thin air and sell it as your own?”

“You don’t understand—“

“It wasn’t ‘thin air’ either. Believe me, I wouldn’t feel the way I do if it was all ‘thin air,’” she says, but she’s not angry.

“I didn’t even know you,” he tells her.

“Then how is it you think you can become me the way you did?”

“’Become you?’”

“Tell the whole world what happened to me—to us—here, in this ‘secret place’ that doesn’t exist.” She pointed north and west. “Walk with me, why don’t you?” she says. “Let me show you.”

“You don’t have to—“

“Let’s go to this ‘Garden of Eden,’” she insists. “Let’s find this place you describe where he took me, this secret place where Garrett and I first made love.” She comes up close to him, and even though he stands a foot taller than she does, she seems unafraid. “You’re surprised that I say it that way?” She looks into his eyes. “Why? I was as human as you. Maybe that’s why it hurt—“

“When I wrote that book,” he says, “you were gone.”

“Not so,” she says, raising a hand as if it were self-evident. “I was here.”

“If I’d have known—“

“If you’d have known it wouldn’t have stopped you for a moment,” she tells him, her voice astoundingly mellow, restrained. “You were driven. It was your calling—these stories. It was what you were born to do.” And now she takes hold of him at the elbow. “Let’s go—you and me—let’s find this secret place.”

“I made it up,” he says. “You know that.”

“But you didn’t make me up,” she says, her hands dropping once again. She takes a few steps back but doesn’t turn around, and her voice is straight-forward, disarmingly passionless. “That’s why these people hated it—what you did—because it was half-truth, and half-truth is worse than a lie because no one knows what to believe.”

“Stories are not to be believed,” he says.

“If that’s true you never would have written a word,” she says. “You wanted to be believed. You wanted nothing but to be believed. That’s why you gave your life for your work. Don’t try to deceive—it doesn’t become you and it never did.”

Just exactly what she wants from him is not so easy to name, but she knows as yet she doesn’t have it. “We remember when you came and chose your plot, some of us do.” She doesn’t raise her voice. “We remember the tears too, not for dying but for your marriage—how it broke just then. We remember these things.”

He looks up at her, amazed.

“Of that you never wrote a word,” she says.

“It’s in there,” he tells her, “that damned agony—it’s in there. You can find it all over in my books.”

“But not her—“

“She was my wife—“

“And I am somehow less human?” she says. “And with me—you can undress me, you can have your way with me, the whole world watching.”

“Not me,” he says, and for the first time, there’s some anger. “It wasn’t me up here,” and he points at some place that isn’t real.

“Yes, you,” she says. “Because you are the one who tells all the world how beautiful I am when I lie back on the grass, my hair like some golden halo all around. You are the one who used me—not him, not my husband.”

He slouches back against his own stone. It’s not often he is speechless, but he hasn’t spoken at all since he’s come. “I gave you life,” he says. “When you were dead and gone, I gave you life.” And he points at her, embittered.

“You think maybe you’re God,” she says.

“No one would know who you are anymore—you know that? No one would pause a moment at your grave, so long ago it was you died. No one would know June Memling."

"That’s not my name and you know it,” she says.

His face seems gray and empty.

“Say it,” she says.

“Say what?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know what she means.

“Tell me my real name—not the name you gave me. Tell me the name by which I was baptized. I’m not yours.”

She stands there waiting, then steps back as if she has forever. She drops her arms from her chest, unbuttons her coat before him, then puts her hands in the pockets. She looks around, sees no one, but she knows better. Hundreds are here, listening. She doesn’t care. They may listen. They’ll want to know. Many have their own stories.

January Thaw - iii

He was an old man, and she was young, even though he’d been just a boy when she was in her agony. Back then, she barely knew him, not even in his teens. But still, when she saw him there in the neighborhood, she couldn’t miss the fact that he still had some youthfulness. She’d felt it the moment he’d looked at her that first time. She is a woman, and even though she died so very young, she had learned—as women do—to read men’s eyes. Nothing was said, but I wonder if after that first time in the short silence, she had considered not going back, afraid of him, as she had cause to be.

Or maybe I’m thinking them too human, these spirits. What need she fear of him, really?

So she waited, maybe, for a January thaw, a cold, crisp night with a silver moon that shines on the faces of the stones and casts shadows across the thin carpet of snow, a night when her going to him cast the whole place into silence because the others wondered what she thought of him, the man who had claimed to know so much more than he should—as if he’d seen her naked, as if he’d actually watched her make love with the man who would be her husband.

I like to think she goes to him late that night, when she thinks she’s alone, when it’s cold but not forbidding, that blue coat wrapped tightly around her, collar up. She thinks it’s a secret almost, but she knows better. The spirits are all around.

He is leaning up against his own stone, a leather coat with sheepskin collar pulled up against a light northwest wind. He is twice her size.

“You don’t know me?” she might have said.

He smiles. He always loved the attention of young and beautiful women. “Is that a question?” he answers.

She hadn’t expected another question, and it is intimidating this first time to be in his presence. “You scare me,” she tells him, which is something no one would expect a Brink to say.

Always genial, he tries to diffuse her fear. “We’re both long gone,” he says. “Besides, you’re young enough to be my daughter.”

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she says.

“Vander Es—you have high cheekbones like a Vander Es.” He points that long finger. “Somewhere in your family line there’s Indian blood.”

She shakes her head.

“Brandsma?” he says. “Tall women, all of them. Good strong Frisian stock.”

That he could be that wrong makes her smile. “Memling,” she tells him.

His eyes narrow, his shoulders hunch just a bit, just a second or two before a long knowing smile, something she doesn’t like, spreads across his face in slow motion. He says nothing.

She nods because she knows at that moment that he knows. “And where is it—this secret place?” she says. Deliberately, she turns her back to him, walks just a few steps north, almost to the fence. “I could look forever—I have,” she says, insistently. “There is no secret place out here. This year, beans; next year, corn—that’s all. There is no ‘Garden of Eden,’ like you said. Long, flat land—very beautiful. But no secret place. You couldn’t have brought some girl here yourself because there isn’t such a place.”

She turns back to him when he offers her no answer. With his finger, he taps his temple three times.

“You can simply lie like that, and we have nothing to say?” she says. “I mean, those people you’ve lied about—we have no recourse?”

He stands, not to make her cower, but he’s thinking that there is disrespect in the way he’s slouching, and he wants her to know that what she’s said—about lying—does matter. “I wasn’t using you,” he tells her.

“Then who were you using?” she asks him.

“I mean, I wasn’t using you. I wasn’t using the real you.”

He approaches her as if to touch her with some comfort; he’s not unfeeling. But she turns away with enough clarity to let him know that she’ll have nothing of that. In life, I’m not sure he could have read that gesture, but he’s dead now, and smarter, less imprisoned. He laughs because he’s always thought he’d had a way with women—more than what he did at least. He holds his hands up as if to come clean. “No reason to be afraid. I’m not my characters,” he says.

“And neither are we,” she tells him, the collar from her coat falling back as she looks coldly over her shoulder. She waits. Waiting comes easily because she has no reason to hurry. She looks away again, towards town, towards the east.

January Thaw - ii

  

And occasionally that first week or so, the rest of them acted strangely around her because they didn’t know how she would feel about his being there, this man, the writer, given what he’d done to her.

So the Brinks being who they are and he being who he was, I think she waited. He was such a presence, always was. And he was big. He was a man. Even when he was an old man, he was a man.

The way I’d like to see it, the first few times she dropped by—her place was maybe two hundred feet or so from his, not far—the first few times she probably hid behind those big stones just south of his because she simply wanted to see him, those long legs, that great white shock of hair, a shard of big blue stem jutting from his mouth, something he’d pulled from the fence line. He didn’t smoke. Sometimes he’d stare down the hill toward the town, the grain elevator and the bridge and the river. And she saw it too, what others had said about his being almost oblivious; but how he smiled, as if he’d made the right choice when he picked out this spot, as if there was something out there that was special to him, something she thought she understood better than the others.

Not everyone up the hill is as happy as he was. Sometimes it takes a year, maybe more, before the angry ones get settled down and neighborly. Then again, some never do. They just stay in the ground or disappear altogether.

She was sure he would have chosen to live if he’d had the choice, even though he was as old as he was, as old as most of the people in the neighborhood, many of whom were actually happy to get here finally, comforted, their agony behind them, some of them claiming, somewhat jokingly, that they’d already been to hell. When she hears such things, sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—she’s less grieved about having found herself here as young as she was at the time, just 21, and leaving her baby, her first, behind. That’s another story. Thats her story.

I’d like to think that sometime that first month after he’d come, one of her friends might have asked her—it would have had to be a friend—whether or not she’d struck up a conversation yet.

“Has anyone?” she likely asked, somewhat perturbed.

Shrugged shoulders. “We’re wondering about you—that’s all.”

She looked away as the Brinks often do.

It likely took some time before she came out from behind the Stravers’ family stone just south of his, and by then it was cold—November, and she had to pull her coat around her, the old blue one, double-breasted, the one her mother had given her so many years ago for a wedding present.

And if I know him, I’m sure that when he spotted her he smiled because she was the kind of tall, willowy young woman that pleased him and always had. She was his dream, as so many of his women were, the ones in his novels.

When she came to him from the darkness, the collar of that thick blue coat pulled up around her face, I’m guessing he didn’t recognize her. So maybe the first time they saw each other nothing happened at all. He glanced up maybe, then fell back into that pleased stare he wore as he looked over the long snow fields.

She probably went back to her place to redesign what she imagined she would say because it had not dawned on her—his knowing as much about her as he did, so very much—that he wouldn’t know her, wouldn’t even recognize her. But then, he hadn’t been around town for so long. As if that should matter; she had to laugh when she thought of it because, of course, neither had she.

________________________

Up the hill, she and the writer--the two of them--begin to talk.

January Thaw -- i

We'll be out of town for a week, so I thought I'd run a short story, the first story in a collection of mine titled Up the Hill. It's a story with a history, an incident in a cemetery one early morning, when I was "up the hill" in the Doon (IA) cemetery where I bumped into someone I didn't expect. The story is based on the discovery of the stone of a young woman who played a significant role in a Manfred novel that plays a significant role in my life.



The photo I want is a long shadow created by a sunrise coming through the old stones in a town cemetery up on a hill above the river. It’s winter, and old snow stretches out in crusty quilts on the frozen earth.

The sun is up, far south on the horizon, and I look hurriedly for the kind of tall stone—one of the ancients—that will throw just the shadow I want. The broad sky’s colors shift quickly, and, still not finding what I’m looking for. I step back against a stone and frame a shot—still no good. I turn around. “Van Engen,” it says, “Jennie, wife of Gerrit Van Engen.” Then “BORN Sept. 15, 1899” and “DIED December 6, 1920.”

I know her. I swear it. I once knew this woman. She was just a girl.

I met her in a novel, the work of the old novelist who is right here too, same burial ground, up in the northwest corner he’d chosen before anyone else had been put back there to rest. For too long she tried to hide her pregnancy, but nothing stays hidden long beneath such broad and open skies. I know her only because I know the novel, a secondary work by a giant of a man, a book that birthed the writer in me. Jennie Van Engen is alive in me even though she died in childbirth and had no descendents.

She was here when he was buried, I’m thinking. She must have seen the burial, even though there were very few. Was she angry? Was she afraid? I wonder how she felt once he was there with her, with them, once again citizens of same town, as they were years ago when he heard her story.

I’m thinking she knows he’s there, but she waits for weeks, maybe months, time being of little concern to her, to them, after all.

He had died in the fall, when the maples were drenched in orange, and to the north those sharp lines of shorn soybean rows looked knifed into the land. She thinks he chose the right time of year—autumn is so beautiful, and there’s relief, the corn finally out although harvest is much easier now with those lumbering machines. Sometimes she wonders if anyone remembers how they used to pick corn, the way snapping ears wrenched your wrists, your lower back in constant pain until the work was finally over or snow clogged the fields.

The way I imagine it, she knew who he was the moment that pine box—how strange, a pine box!—was lugged into the neighborhood. There it stood above the ground. Everyone saw it. It was white and big—huge. Word had gone around that he was dead, that he would be buried in the cemetery above the town he loved, a town that sometimes hated him for what he wrote. She knew who he was, only too well—everyone did.

But she was a Brink, and the Brinks were timid by nature. Soon enough she’d heard how some of the others had walked over to look, gawking as if his being there was some freak show. Made her laugh to think about it, but then people had always been afraid of him.

They said at first he was sitting against a fencepost—his stone wasn’t up yet— those long legs stretched out before him. He seemed to love to look out at the fields west and north. Some remembered that time too when he’d come to the neighborhood to choose the site. That was years ago. They said it seemed as if, since his arrival, he’d rather enjoyed being alone, far in the corner, staring into the openness. Not angry either, but looking over the land as if something was right there, something the rest of them didn’t see.

She thought she knew, but she didn’t say.

No one spoke to him. But then, he had a reputation.

There were others with reputations too, but not like his.

"Everybody was somebody"

Barbara and the Wolfgang Puck maitre d'

It was a night not to forget. The one-and-only responsibility of the parents of the groom was to choose the eatery for the post-rehearsal dinner and make sure of its readiness. We'd stopped that afternoon. She'd chatted amicably with the staff, reminded them of their commitment. It was a downtown Tulsa, a Mexican food place, lots of five-stars on the website, a popular place the bride told us had a great reputation.

As indeed it did. When we showed up that night, the rehearsal behind us, the place was hopping, with a line of customers waiting for tables. The wedding crew counted a couple dozen or so, parents and close friends, so many we didn't fit even in the pint-sized waiting area. 

The dirty, rotten truth was they hadn't reserved a room. Or, if they had, the news hadn't found its way to the evening crew. There was literally no room in the inn. The place was rocking, and my wife--who'd been the one to do all the work--was at a place on her emotional register I'd never seen her before. "Why, sure, we can take you," the waitress said, "but you'll have to wait, and, no, I don't think we can seat you all together." 

The mother of the groom could have spit fire. I tried to calm her, told her we could get pizzas and go back to the motel, bring the  whole gang along or something.

"Or something" wasn't going to do it that night, so with the heart of Napoleon, she left, shook the dust off a new pair of shoes, and marched right down the street, downtown Tulsa, me behind, startled by the high octane determination on a face I'd seen daily for 30 years, her adamant determination shockingly visible to the whole wedding party. Dang it (I'm sure the vocab was rougher), her son was going to have a fine rehearsal dinner come hell or high water right there in the Arkansas River. 

It wasn't early, but when we came to a Wolfgang Puck with outside seating, she walked in, pulled on a gracious but grieving face, found the maitre d', and then explained the horror of what had happened and asked for grace. Honestly, the place was emptying.

"Let me ask the cooks if they can handle a big group yet," the woman said before leaving the front. When she returned, she was smiling. We had a place for a rehearsal dinner, and we had just one long table. 

She never told me the story I'm about to tell you until a day ago or so, when it came up somehow--how it was that our friends Marv and Helene were there at Wolfgang Puck. They'd come all to Tulsa for David's wedding. 

We were talking about Marv because he passed away last week, somewhat unexpectedly to those who hadn't known or seen him as of late. He died getting off a plane, in a wheelchair. He and his wife were returning from Mexico, a place they visited with beloved regularity. I don't know--but I can't help thinking they shouldn't have gone, not in his shape. But it was like him to go anyway because it would have been tougher not to. 

Barbara told me that she'd tipped that gracious Wolfgang Puck maitre d' royally and thanked her bountifully for setting up a wonderful rehearsal dinner, but she also said she remembered the way Marv had purposely gone to the back to find her after the meal, to speak to her. "I thought then, and I still do," she said, "that Marv pulled out his wallet and tipped her too." 

We may never know whether he did, but Barbara has always harbored the suspicion that Marv simply could not help rewarding that young woman's blessed grace. 

And, you know? --whether he did or not is immaterial. That, today, on the day of his funeral, we both believe he did is itself a testimony to his great heart because, well, it would have been like him to do just that. That's the character of the man the family will bury today.

"He made people feel seen and known," his son Kurt says in his eulogy. "Everybody was somebody to Marv Rietema."

Kurt has it right.