A year ago now

Nevaeh and her mom

She wasn't a surprise. In a sense, my granddaughter's baby had already been around, already made herself known. Jocelyn was greatly pregnant and proud of it, in the way that mom's--maybe especially first-baby moms--are. She was "showing," as they say, and proud of it.

So I knew very well what--and who--was coming. It wasn't as if that little darling slipped out surreptitiously. Her appearance was neither sudden nor unexpected--she was no prem-ie.

It's just that, for the first time in my life, my home was a hospital where I was a patient with a problem that seemed mysterious, at least to me--I couldn't walk. Honestly, I couldn't walk. I had to be wheel-chaired around by someone else always, all the time. Routine hospital life was new and strange, even frightening, nurses coming in every half hour it seemed, to check this-or-that bodily function, or just to make sure I was comfy in my pint-sized hospital bed.

"You're so tall," they'd say when they pulled my pants up. "How tall are you anyway?"

I not tall, and I'd tell them as much, but they'd  say it anyway. Made me feel, for a minute maybe, that I wasn't a resident of a "home."

It didn't take long before I realized I was slightly different patient from the others at Heartland Manor. I was no youngster, but none of the residents were more able than I was or more anxious to get stronger. 

Anyway, maybe three days in, I got the call. I hadn't been on the edge of my bed, waiting, but, out of nowhere, my wife happily passed on the glorious news. Everything went fine, she told me, and the baby--her name was strange, "Nevaeh," or something like that--and she was beautiful, and, oddly enough, gifted with hair, unlike any child inheriting my DNA.  "You're a great-grandpa," she said.

I surprised myself and teared up a little. I didn't mean to, and if you'd asked earlier that afternoon--"will it be emotional all of a sudden?" I'd have smiled and reassured you that nothing so tender would occur. About that, I was dead wrong. I got blubbery.

A nurse stopped by--check vitals or something--I told her, first thing. "Guess what, I'm a . . .' and just like that the blubbery me reappeared. Couldn't help it. Still surprises me when I say it. 

The thing is, that blubbery-ness got passed along, like some tender virus maybe, a hearty, lovely contagion. That darling nurse--I could have hugged her--broke out in a tear or two when I did. And then then another nurse appeared--I don't know who said it, but she got told, tearily, that Jim the new guy just got told he's a great-grandpa. Brand new baby. Soon enough there was a trio of blubberers, and then a quartet, when someone else dropped in. A chorus of tears.

Do they teach nurses to cry when appropriate?

I couldn't remember the new baby's name, so one of them--who'd heard it before--wrote it on a sheet of paper and taped to my tv, put it up there in syllables: "Nev-a-ya," so I wouldn't look like an idiot when asked.

There were sat--well, nobody was sitting. I was in bed, and the three of them were at the foot, all of us drawing Kleenex, happy as larks. 

That's all a year ago now. almost to the day. Nevaeh's birthday is Saturday. The little bandit steals our hearts. She'll be one year big. 

And it's a year since I got myself signed into Heartland Manor for more exacting therapy on legs that wouldn't work. 

I don't think I could begin to thank those nurses enough for what they did for me and to me--and it wasn't all joy either. I told my wife I wouldn't have believed how often other women pulled my pants down and up. I fell in love a dozen times.

And I didn't walk out when I was sent home. It was tough to get into a car--I fell more than once. 

But yesterday I walked around the whole settlement here, a place called "Woodbridge," senior housing, where we live today. I walked all the way around, maybe an eighth of a mile, with a walker, two days in a row without having to stop and rest once. Not once. At Heartland, I learned to love tiny victories, a lesson you can't help but learn from living with the infirm.

And this: Saturday, we're invited to Neveah's first birthday party.

It'll be fun I'm sure, but I can't help but remember three blubbering nurses lovin' the moment for me and with me. As I creep along toward a recovery I may never experience, when I remember those nurses I can't help but smile. Great therapy. I loved them all. 

Still do.

A hero's legacy

 

The man may well have been a hero--he was, in fact; there's no denying history. In the very first battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi, the Battle at Wilson's Creek, General Nathaniel Lyon took a bullet to the heart and became the Union's very first martyr/hero. Thousands attended his body's long ride back to his home in Connecticut. The war had only just begun.

Lyon was no stranger to war in 1861. His war experience included the war against the Seminoles in Florida, the Mexican-American War (where his bravery earned him commendation). Then to California, where he found his way to yet another bloody confrontation, a horrific event called Bloody Island Massacre. 

No one considered him a man of peace, so when he left California, he was sent to Ft. Riley, Kansas, where he found himself at the heart of "bleeding Kansas."  Abolitionist Easterners like John Brown fought pro-slavery forces from the American South after Congress had passed the Kansas-Missouri Act, which allowed extremists from both sides to move west in an attempt to establish the new state of Kansas as either slave or free. 

Then Captain Nathaniel Lyon was given command of the Saint Louis Arsenal, where, in the neighborhood, there lingered a local (and therefore pro-slavery) fighting unit called Missouri Volunteer Militia. Capt. Lyon surreptitiously surrounded then took control of the Militia and marched them through greatly unsympathetic streets of the city. Someone took a shot--and you guessed it, all hell broke loose. Almost 30 civilians were killed.

It was clear that the two sides stood as fortresses against each other. Some historians today are not at all afraid to say that the Civil War didn't begin at Fort Sumter, but in "bleeding Kansas."

Maybe it was his extensive experience at war, but at Wilson's Creek, by then General Lyon broke up his forces, too a hill which that day became "Bloody Hill" then held off three Confederate advances before retreating. When things  were in a stall, General Lyon himself yelled, "Come on, my brave boys, I will lead you!! Forward!!"

 Very soon, he was gone, a bullet to the heart.

Why all of this about a fighting man long forgotten? Well, you can view the battlefield for yourself by way of St. Louis in three hours or so, and on a short hike through the battlefield find a concave pit that was once a mass grave for the Union dead. It will take your breath away. Just over 2500 American boys were dead or wounded or missing.

Really, why the story? 

Because once upon a time some early settlers looked over the land they'd claimed as their own in far northwest Iowa--way, way up in the far northwest corner of Iowa. No one quite knows why, but in the early 1850s the state legislature had named the far corner of Iowa Buncombe County.

Buncombe is/was a word for useless political speech, so in 1862 someone determined to toss that buncombe b.s. into the Big Sioux River and replace it with something less silly, more commemorative. Who thought of what it's named? No one knows.

But it was less than a year since General Nathanial Lyon was killed in the first big battle out west in Missouri. He was leading his troops when he went down, a real hero. That far corner of Iowa needed a name, so they tossed buncombe and determined to forever remember a hero here in Lyon County. 

Sunday morning meds--Psalm 32

 

“Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven. . .”

 Alice Munro’s Runaway, includes a story titled “Trespasses,” a word only slightly less archaic, perhaps, than “transgressions.”  In typical Munro-vian fashion, she weaves together several plot lines and a gallery of fully human characters who move relentlessly toward an end that is as foreordained as any ending she’s ever written.  In fact, the story begins with a tableau—four unidentified people performing some unspecified ritual late at night, on a river bank—a scene which is also the story’s own dramatic climax.  In the story’s first page and a half, Munro shows us where we’re going; then she spends the next half hour of reading time explaining how we got there.

Great stories defy summary, so I’m on dangerous ground, but I’ll try anyway.  Lauren, an eleven or twelve year-old “only child,” meets Kate, who works at the restaurant where kids her age stop after school.  When Kate shows Lauren a ton of attention, singling her out from her friends, readers can’t help becoming fearful.  Slowly, the truth emerges:  Kate has spent some significant time finding Lauren, a child she believes to be her own, a child she once gave up for adoption. 

But Lauren—still very much a child—knows a story Kate doesn’t because once upon a time she stumbled on a vial her father quietly explained held the ashes of her sister, a baby who was killed just before Lauren was born.  He warns her, however, never to bring up the story in front of her mother, who cannot bear any reminder of the accident which took the baby’s life.  That baby’s name was Lauren.

When Kate threatens to open up the whole story, something must be done.  Soon, the story of the accident emerges, a story which began in a fight about abortion because Lauren’s father wasn’t interested in another child.  Lauren’s mother took off in the car, an accident ensued, and the baby—the adopted child Kate had given up—was killed because she wasn’t fastened into the seat.

The story is rife with pain—her father’s, for not wanting Lauren; her mother’s, for her inattention; and Kate’s, for once, long ago, giving her child away. 

So one night, in an attempt to find what people call today “closure,” the four major characters of “Trespasses” head out to the spot of the accident, repeat some lines from the Lord’s Prayer, and leave behind the baby’s remains.

That’s not the end of the story, however.  In some ways, the denouement is even more horrifying because Lauren, the only child, is left carrying the greatest burden of all, the child of a marriage that has been bleeding grief ever since she was born.  Her parents are distanced, from each other and from her.  The only adult who’d ever shown her any love, Kate, now leaves, having rejected Lauren once she discovered the child wasn’t hers.

Munro doesn’t trumpet closure for the adults of this story; we really don’t know whether or not they’ll ever find the peace they’ve never felt.  What we know, however, is that this second Lauren will wear forever the livery of her parents’ trespasses. 

It’s a story that reminds me of the great Old Testament curse of sin, that it will live for generations—“punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

The Blessedness with which Psalm 32 begins is created by that most marvelous of nouns—forgiveness.  But forgiveness really can’t be appreciated with anything less than a full-bodied understanding of sin, our sin.  The miracle of our forgiveness works only when our sin is wholly acknowledged.

The miracle of forgiveness—and it is a miracle—is experienced only when we know our sin.

 Which is to say, those who know real forgiveness once knew, for real, their sin.

Your and my old lizards

I'm in way over my head, but stay with me.

Long, long ago, the Siouxland novelist Frederick Manfred used to preach that we all--all of us humans--were managed far more substantially by our sub-cortex, that area of the brain surrounded as if protected by the greatly blessed cortex, the home of what researchers might have thought of as all things bright and beautiful. The cortex was in all things fashionable; the sub-cortex was a lizard.

Human behavior--how we do what we do and are what we are--is, scientists have surmised, most greatly determined by our big blessed cortex. Mostly. No one denied that some stealthy inner motivations, from the sub-cortex were important, but those unwashed urgings were modulated or controlled and shaped by the cortex.

My old friend, Fred Manfred, the novelist and story-teller, used to claim we were far more substantially shaped by the primitive urges of the sub-cortex than any of us care to realize. Of that fact he'd say, we shouldn't be shy, pointing that long, skinny finger of his. What he and others  called "the lizard" within us, is far more of a dominating force than we'd like to admit--thus, saith Frederick Manfred.

In a thoughtful essay about Lord Grizzly, Manfred's most accomplished novel, John H. Timmerman traces the novel's mythic hero, Hugh Glass, desperate for life and then revenge after having been left for dead by his companions. "The Lizard crawls down in Hugh Glass through layers of vengeance and love, a burning desire to live and a desire for blood, down past desperation and dreams into a spiritual bedrock where forgiveness struggles against rage." 

Fred Manfred believed in the powers of the sub-cortex. Get him on the subject, and the night would be soon gone. I've never forgotten him and his lizard. 

And I've learned. Take me, for example. I've carried a long scar up and down the left side of my face for the last 75 years. It's as much a part of me as my non-existent hairline. Should you meet me sometime, you might just be struck by something you hadn't figured on--that lousy scar. 

But in all likelihood you wouldn't mention it; good taste suggests that asking about something like a facial scar, on first meeting--isn't at all kosher. You've got to know me first, or, so your conscience, the voice of your cortex, would remind you.

Manfred, the old lizard himself, used to say that a writer has to culture that inner, darker consciousness because the voice that says, "Where'd that Schaap guy get that scar?" is the voice one has to cultivate, to listen to and for, because it speaks the unvarnished truth. It's that "internal commentator," he'd say, who speaks truth. That's your lizard speaking. your I. C., he used to say.

Frederick Manfred was a preacher about some things, and "'the lizard' in us" was one of his favorites. 

All well and good. Call me a fool, but there's news out of Cambridge University now that research suggests--guess what?--that the sub-cortex may well play a far more determining part in human behavior than we'd like to estimate. 

Is that okay? Well, what will be will be, even if it might be a little scary. Life without the guidelines we inherit and use in and from our more moderate cortex--a sense of what's decent, what's good and right--might well contrast with grim reminders of the Old West, where life and death is determined by who has the quickest draw--a world drawn more from Trump than Obama.

I'm no expert, but I can't help but think that my friend Manfred would be smiling right now if he has consciousness enough to understand that what he used to preach just happens to have some new and amazing relevancy.

I know exactly where he's buried--right there in Doon cemetery, in the back, along the fence where, he said before he died, he could watch the corn fields yellow this time of year. You just have to take a little left on the path through the stones and watch for the stone--it's sort of pinkish.

But you don't have to go. I'll do it sometime. He'll love it, the old lizard.

Something from another world

It's confounding to know how to describe a rain forest. What happens all around when you're in it is so remarkable that it's stunning. 

It looks cartoonish, as if it couldn't be real, couldn't be a photograph at all but some monstrosity created by AI, as a setting for something alien. But it isn't--it's just what happens to things in a certain wet environment--a combination of plant life and  showers and mist and never-ending humidity. 

But what it looks like is weird.

I hate to say it, but if you let your mind open to soak in everything around you, it's almost horrifying.

Yet, somehow beautiful. Horrifyingly beautiful--no beautifully horrifying. Not that either. Can't be either really, or both --and saying that just extends the confounding problem in the rainforest. 

Nothing in this scramble will attack you, but nothing really begs you to get any closer or asks you to be a friend.

 

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a group of friends from the prairies took a trip to the ocean in Washington, to Olympia National Park--eight days of soaking in the visions of a remarkably awesome region. 

At the end of their travels, they asked each other what day, what place, what activity they each found most unforgettable--and the answer, from every last visitor/hiker? The most memorable place, visit, time was the couple hours they spent here--in the rainforest. 

Something beautiful, but more. . .something compelling yet fearful, something fearful but enchanting, something beyond words maybe. . .

Something from another world.

150 years after. . .

 

Well,   you missed it. You can pick it up off the Dutch American Heritage Museum website, I'm told, but it may well be one of those things where you just had to be there. It was great fun--and that's all I ever promised.

When, months ago, I discovered that my museum board colleague had developed a fascination for a character from a huge book, The Story of Sioux County, I couldn't help but remember that the story she loved (an inn-owner, a woman, taken to jail for not paying a tax the town put on its liquor dealers), I couldn't help but remember pulling that same story from the same old volume and using it in my very first attempt to write anything at all. That story, "The Mocker," was a selection in Sign of a Promise and Other Stories (1979).

So, when the board asked me to come up with something for its final attraction of the Nights at the Museum programs, I thought it just might be good to use that story (Mother Mouw--what a great name!) as the basis for a readers theater presentation.

It was a ball. You'd have to find a real sourpuss to claim that it was anything less than a joy for the audience and a treat for me--using material that, for me, is 50 years old. But for Orange City too, where it actually happened, many, many  years ago, Mother Mouw dragged off to jail on the Constable's wagon, sitting in dignitiy on her bed, her dog at her side, to serve time for refusing the pay a tax on liquor, a tax she claimed patently unfair. 

Wonderful story.

A story 150 years old.

Incredibly rugged beaches

Lots of Oostburgian stuff on this website as of late, but this isn't a shot of the west side of Lake Michigan, the cold side, where I grew up. That beach seems insignificant when compared to a whole gallery of beaches in Olympia National Park, so wide and rough the camera can't get it all in. That's where we were for a while, and it was beautiful.

Looks like this most all the time, the waves coming all the way from the other side of the Pacific Ocean--rough water, pounding surf. If it spends a late afternoon calm and placid, I didn't witness it. It just seemed to be always this rough.

Looks like this from even farther back (if you can, get up close--there's people down there).

The word, I suppose, is rugged--"the seacoast at Olympic National Park is take-your-breath-away rugged." Not for sissies, and not for wheelchairs. Even though I couldn't get down there, I could shoot the edges of the most rugged beaches I've ever seen.

Since wheelchairs don't run well on beach sand, I didn't get too far on those rugged, rugged immensely open spaces, but that doesn't mean I didn't love 'em--so wide, so deep, so, well, ruggedly gorgeous.

The only space at all comparable, at least that I've seen, is the beaches on the Frisian island Terschelling, which looks out toward the North Sea, the place my great-grandparents lived 150 years ago. In both places, when you stand at the far edge and look toward the seam of land and water, you can't help but realize that getting to the water requires some gumption. It's a long, long ways. 

I used to love the Lake Michigan beaches close to home, but they are nothing like this, so I tried my best to take at least something of their ruggedness home with me, everything I could get into the camera, which happened to be my phone.

Rugged place, but, oh, so gorgeous, on a sunny day in mid-September. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven. . .”

 It seems to me that this isn’t the first time I’ve typed in that word as a title.  If I go back to the first psalm, first meditation, I’d see it there, as well.

The word—and what it suggests—remains a treasure.  I don’t think you have to be a believer in Jesus Christ’s redemptive work to aspire to the riches the word suggests.  I doubt anyone’s ever done a poll, but my guess is that a multitude of those who spend their nights at what America calls “gaming,” they too would love to be blessed, in their case by what they’d call luck. 

But Dame Fortune, in her ancient medieval garb, looked like Sandra Bullock as long as she was smiling. When she’d turn, she’d morph into Phyllis Diller.

I believe—and I may be generous here—that everyone from Pope Francis to the last week’s serial killer would most likely want, more than anything, to be “blessed.”  I do too.  A considerable number of us, like Jacob, would fake IDs to get it, if we sensed we were in the neighborhood of blessedness.  To be blessed is a condition that most of us believe we know only because its pursuit dominates our dreams.

Not long ago, we buried a man named Henry.  He was devout, but never, ever self-righteous, always courteous and loving and considerate.  I visited him once in the wing of the hospital, when his wife of sixty years was close to death, very close, I thought.  He spoke to her and read to her, even smiled at her as if she hung on his every word.  Maybe she did. 

If those who knew him 24/7 ever saw another side of Henry, I don’t think I’d like to know.  But I’m enough of a Calvinist to believe he was probably capable of something other than the grace that radiated from his presence as long as I knew him.  I’m sure he carried his own inner demons, fought his own battles. 

When Henry knew his death was imminent, he wrote a note to his children that all travel costs his geographically dispersed family would accrue for his funeral should be paid before anyone looked into his estate.  By profession, he’d been a Professor of Business, and that little note on the bottom of a sheet of paper was scribbled by an accountant.  But it was also the act of a man who knew he’d been blessed and understood that his role was to do likewise.

I bring him up only because it seems to me that, through our lives, most of us know very, very few people to whom we might affix the description of “being truly blessed.”  Henry was one of those.  And I’m blessed—as all of us were in this community—to have known him.

But how do we get blessed, if, in fact, being blessed can be somehow obtained?  Is there something I can do, or is it simply a gift, like grace itself? 

Psalm 1 begins with the same word as does Psalm 32, but then it describes the condition of being blessed by illustrating how the blessed among us conduct their lives, what they do and don’t.  Psalm 32, people say, is more of a how-to, a maschil, a sermon psalm.

 Consider its ways and be wise.  Consider its ways and be blessed.  Follow its instructions, if indeed you—or I--can.              

Morning Thanks--for reading

I'm not at all sure what caused hundreds of extra readers over the last week to tune into Stuff in the Basement. A couple of days before leaving for the Pacific northwest, , I decided to run that Oostburg piece. I worried it might be too exclusive--I mean, all that Schaap stuff and all that Oostburg stuff--and not a sermon, nary a sermon to be found. 

I guess I'm thinking that a really great sermon can make something concrete and lasting out of a volatile mixture of scriptural truth and the war-torn spirit we carry from life's experience. I've never considered myself a preacher, despite writing hundreds of pieces that have almost always contained a rather obvious moral tone, even called "devotionals." But I know the difference between "preachin' and singin'" as James Russell Lowell once explained about himself and his work. I've always considered myself a singer, not a preacher. 

That having been said, the huge Oostburg essay is a ton of singing, and I couldn't help but wonder how all of that Schaap identity stuff would be taken by the people who sat in the pews that night. You walk into church, and it's full--you can't help but think you're going to get a good timber-shaking, knees-knocking, rip-roaring sermon.

No sir and no ma'am. This Schaap guy basically set out to lecture the bunch on history and squirrel a way through it with his own boyhood and family saga without a real live homily at all.

I needed to show them how Oostburgian the guy in the blonde pulpit up front really was, how when my Mom and Dad got hitched, it was thoroughly a downtown Oostburg event--Dad from the parsonage on the north side and Mom from the blacksmith shop across Main, nary a half block between 'em. 

The numbers have floored me. My guess is that some Oostburgians got wind of that speech getting some air time long, long ago, passed the news around at Judy's (the cafe, not my sister), and enlisted a ton of locals to follow it alone. No single day has topped 300 readers, but they've been close, and who knows but some who've read some early chunks might just return for another piece of anniversary cake.

Whoever you are, I hope, deeply, that it was worth your trouble to wander out here to the prairie and follow along.

Honestly, I'm deeply thankful.

Oostburg CRC 150th birthday -- vii

Just one more thought.  

In those years we lived here—1980-82—I wanted my kids to see my dad on his knees, trowel in hand, wanted them to sense something of the oddly-hallowed ground where their own unknown great-grandparents had been laid decades ago. That’s why I took them along to Hartman cemetery. The experience didn’t charge them with respect, not in the least.

From the edge of the hill where the cemetery stands, you can still see the belt of lake water run straight as a ruler all along the horizon to the east. Freshly-tilled farmland patched meadows stretching into the woods that underline the seam of lake and sky.                        

The cemetery grass that day was freshly cut, the stones shiny in the soft yellow dusk of an early spring morning, and the whole place seemed to them little more than a playground they'd never spotted before, a schoolground obstacle course--at least a couple hundred different solid shapes in straight rows, perfect for climbing, even riding along like stone ponies.

But when they started in on leap-frog, I finally collared them. I tried to explain how such merry-making simply wasn't in good taste in a cemetery, but they didn't really understand, but they could just as well have been listening to a stone monument. So I settled them down—or tried to. “No more of that,” I said, and they looked up at me bewildered.

"Sometimes you get to wonder where all the faithful people have gone--men like Johnny Luteyn," my dad once told me, years ago, as if it were an editorial. He was feeling his age. "People like John Luteyn were powerful saints."

But I also remember what I was thinking in the middle of my father’s very serious lament. He knew this old man Luteyn in ways that I didn’t. To me, John Luteyn was simply an white-haired gent who sat in the same church bench every Sunday, maybe the last man in the church who could sing the Psalms in the Dutch language.

To my father, it may have seemed there were no more John Luteyns. To me, a whole generation behind, there still were. In fact, my dad is to me what John Luteyn was to him, and so were others in Oostburg CRC—men and women of real faith.  To some of you, maybe Norm Mentink.

All of which makes me think that perhaps I was wrong in chewing out my kids all those years ago in the Hartman cemetery for their graveyard game of leap-frog. It may not have been in good taste, what they did—but in spirit, it was just fine and to the point.

I hope and pray that my own children and grandchildren know the comfort and strength of the faith       their grandparents knew. That's at least part of the reason I brought them along to the graves of their great-grandparents.

It's not a game really, but it is a kind of leap-frog we all play.  Those people we respect for their devotion, their industry, their strength of character--for their faith--are themselves monuments who stand in our minds as stone-strong testimonies of belief and blessed assurance.

But those men and women are there to leap too, because once they are gone we do not stand still and lament forever the fact that they we’ve been left behind. We don't stand in the shadow of a tree that's been felled. Following the straight-and-narrow for 150 years of history doesn’t mean never turning corners. Life goes on. Only God Almighty is the great I AM.

The rest of us may well stand in Hartman Cemetery or Oostburg’s, south of town. We may stand there or here in celebration of 150 years of faith, but it's always time to move. It's September, and yet another church year has already begun, a whole new round of Bible studies and catechism, and huis bezoek.

Like it or not, we must all jump up and over what’s come before us just like the kids, push ourselves up on the strength of those cemetery monuments and then vault over and even beyond in the firm conviction that the Creator of Heaven and Earth was, is, and forever shall be here beside us on the land and in the woods of this beautiful lakeshore.

 The good news of the gospel is forever the same. It’s an old, old story, and it goes like this: He loves us. 

That’s it, isn’t it? Jesus loves me, this I know. 

Oostburg CRC - 150 years - vi

The second World War put people back to work, but it also brought men into war.    First Orange City had as many as 40 men in the armed services at a time during World War II. I don’t know the totals from Oostburg, but there must have been close to thirty. In fact, in the front window of the parsonage, right downtown, there were five stars, meaning five children gone to war. Reverend Schaap—my grandpa—lost his wife in 1943, my grandma, middle of war, to a lingering illness. She was just 61. I have letters that he wrote to family—here and abroad—that witness to his Calvinist faith and his stoic grief.  Both of them too are buried in Hartman cemetery.

My dad went to the Pacific.  I found this picture in the bible he toted back then. My mom would be angry for a year if she knew I had it up there.

Mom had two babies during the war, two babies when Dad came home on a train in Milwaukee. She told me she got anxious about just how to greet him, and how he would react. He’d seen Judy, but not in two years, never seen Gail. How would he act—would he pick up Judy first, or the daughter he’d never seen? Should she greet him first? 

What did you do? I asked her. “Finally, I just decided to go alone.” I love that story, told at both my kids’ weddings. But I know very well that she wasn’t the only young mom who went through the same decision-making when a dad who’d been gone to war finally returned.

I’m a “baby boomer,” a massive generation created when my father and hundreds of thousands of others, dozens in Oostburg CRC, returned from World War II and started families. My dad built a good chunk of his own house himself and worked in Oostburg for Gilson Manufacturing, where a factory, among other things, turned out cement mixers affordable by the millions of men building theirs.

I was born in 1948, Sheboygan Memorial Hospital, the third child of Calvin and Jean Schaap, and I lived, for as long as I remember, at 714 Superior Avenue.

Here's the three of us what we called “our back porch,” a slab of concrete. I was baptized in the downtown Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, by my grandfather the preacher, who had only recently retired. He lived with us, I remember, but he died in 1956—and I don’t remember him, except as a grouch.

He was a strong proponent of Christian education, as were my parents. The Christian school began the year I was born, I believe, so I attended—I was close enough to walk home for lunch. Often, I made my own—I must have eaten a thousand boiled hot dogs—because Mom was giving piano lessons at noon, to people who probably still worship here. I still love hot dogs.

    Mom lost a sister in the very first years of the Christian School’s operation in a freakish accident in thick lake fog. They were going to Milwaukee in weather her parents told her was dangerous. In that pre-seat belt era, she was thrown into the windshield and sustained injuries that took her life while no one else in the car was hurt. Gertie Dirkse was one of the first teachers in the brand new Christian school. Starting a new Christian school was no picnic; Oostburg people went to war. I can’t help but wonder how my own parents--dear, dear Christian believers--felt about the death of their sister so quickly into the life of that school.

 In eighth grade at Oostburg Christian, at the end of a long Friday, I took out a slip of paper, stuck it into my mouth, let it get wet and soggy, then whipped it up against one of the big windows on the south wall, where it sat like a monster. That was what we did. I wasn’t the first, and I likely wasn’t the last.

But I got caught. And a man named Phares LeFever, our neighbor, in fact, shook his head angrily. “You did it?” he said, pointing at me. “You did it? You—a Schaap?”

It was the worst thing he could have said. I hated him for it. It was entirely unfair for him to say something like that because he wouldn’t have gone after any other kid in the room in the same way. “You—a Schaap?”

But it was also the best thing for me. I don’t doubt that some educational psychologist would say it was an awful thing to say, but when I went home that night, angry as sin, I came to realize something I’d never really thought about—that, in a way, I am not my own because I belong to something bigger than I am, not just a family of Mayors and Pastors, but a bigger family. I wasn’t just "Jimmy"—I was something far less and far, far more.

I grew up in this church, listening to four different preachers

There was no Christian High back then, and when my dad suggested I could board with someone in Waupun, I wasn’t interested. So I’m an OHS grad, one of those who spent far too much of his time and strength in sports. But it was a good experience. When I went off to college, I just wanted to be a coach.Right here in Oostburg, between the Onion River and Lake Michigan, I had a wonderful boyhood.

 But that was the late 60s, a difficult era for families and a church. I got radicalized by a war I thought wrong in Vietnam. My parents didn’t like my criticisms, but that was true in families throughout the church and the nation. World War II values didn’t look good in beads and bell-bottoms.

I left Oostburg and have lived, for the most part, in Iowa. Whenever I’d come home to visit in those years, I’d attend, with them, and often go over to the parsonage where a group of honest-to-goodness adults would have adult Sunday School. It used to get a little heated in that basement because people didn’t want to listen to their hippie kids, but I remember always feeling good about being there, never being repulsed or not tolerated. It was, at the time, church at its best, I think.

And that’s just about all I know about Oostburg and Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, all, at least of any historical value.

Oostburg CRC v

 

Nothing changed the church or the nation like the events begun in August of 1914, with the First World War. It took three years for the United States of America to become wholly engaged in “the Great War,” but when finally, troops shipped off to France, war itself changed the nation and the Oostburg Christian Reformed Church like nothing else because for better or worse, it was now officially and powerfully vital for a Dutch bunch to become American. Old Highway 32, I believe, was named after one of Wisconsin’s most tried-and-true World War I divisions.

Ninety-four Sheboygan County Doughboys never returned from “the war to end all wars,” probably half of them victims of conflict, the other half of various forms of influenza that became a world-wide epidemic

One of them, as I’ve already said, was my Great Uncle, pictured here with is brother-in-law and my grandpa Dirkse, Harry, the blacksmith who ran a gas station when farm horses disappeared. Note the downtown Oostburg CRC behind them on Center Avenue, a mud road, that sports horse rails.

Grandpa’s wife, Edgar’s sister, my Grandma learned to recite the Heidelberg Catechism, but, she told me, giggling, in the Dutch language, a language she couldn’t really understand. I tell that story because nothing changed language like the First World War, when one CRC soldier wrote home that he was angry about the fact that, when on the battlefield, at night he understood the whispers coming from the German trenches better than the English of his buddies from New York City or Alabama. When boys like that came back, they were conscious, maybe for the first time, that they were Americans, not Hollanders.

Gerrit VerVelde, 25 years old, a private in the 59^th infancy, was killed in action near Marne, Argonne Forest, almost 100 years ago today, September 30, 1918  And look what I found in an old Sheboygan County book.

    By the time the Thirties came around, things had changed substantially, even though I’m sure Oostburg CRC still fought about language. There were, of course, bigger problems—the American Depression affected city life and farm country. In Oostburg, no one had any money.  

    My paternal grandparents moved here, Grandpa into the pulpit, in 1932, the worst of times.  

    That’s my father on the far left. He passed what the catechism used to call “the age of discretion” here in Oostburg, his adolescence, and, obviously, married an Oostburg girl, who grew up across the street from the parsonage, right downtown.

 My grandmother Schaap wrote her relatives about the town in a simple but loving hand.

    The preacher’s family was poor, but then so was everyone else. My father claimed there really was no salary to speak of, no money coming in; but what helped the family along was vegetables and meat and canned goods from farmer families, church members. Food would be left on the parsonage porch by people who cared but didn’t need to be identified.

Both mom’s and dad’s families, during the Depression, were less than a block from the railroad, which meant getting hit up by hobos hitching rides, hither and yon, throughout the country, most of them looking for work, all of them looking for something to eat.

    Across the street and down the block from the parsonage sat the blacksmith shop/gas station. In the height of the Great Depression, Grandpa Dirkse would come up the stairs to the kitchen some nights, sit over a bowl of soup or a slice of bread with cheese, put his head in his hands, and cry. My mom was just a kid, but no kid forgets her father’s tears.

There was no money, period. Farmers would come in for shoeing or to get their shares sharpened, or for fuel oil, and look at him sorrowfully. They couldn’t pay. His dilemma was profound. He couldn’t go on without an income; his family wouldn’t be fed. But neither could he turn down what the farmers needed or their families wouldn’t eat. There were no bucks in big empty leather wallets.