Like Saints

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against 'Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.

When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, Mary mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way--as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and guilt-ridden Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his sinful mistress. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). The paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact.

I never had a problem with that wonderful last line of the Luke 2 story--"and Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (NIV), nor did i ever fume about her remarkable--"divine"--compliance to the angel's bizarre directives a chapter earlier: "May it happen to me according to your word,” she says at the angel's annunciation. She's what?--13 maybe, and she's about to be pregnant while unmarried, and, as yet, untouched in any ordinary ways.

The Lord God almighty knew what he was doing when he picked Mary out of the gallery. He wanted--and he got--someone who'd do whatever had to be done. "Of course," she could have said. "When should I write it in my calendar?"

But just last night, we listened to Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven point us at the strangely, and equally compliant husband-to-be, who likely understood he was going to have to fib to get this one through the ringer.

They're hardly human, those two. They get visited supernaturally--who's to say it wasn't just a bizarre dream?--and just like that, they fold, both of them. "Sure, Lord God," they say. "When does this whole thing begin?"

"How about this?" the Creator might have told them--"at the beginning of time,'"

I doubt that would have stopped them either. They just trust too much. They're like saints.

 

A Prayer for the Dead -- vi

Technically, the story is over when Bea ponders the star her mother deliberately placed beneath the linoleum cover they put on their kitchen table. At that point, Bea had begun to wonder whether she'd lived her life in the right way with respect to her missionary parents. That moment was the technical climax of the story.

The writer (that's me) has to make sure, as sure as my artistic sense will allow, that my readers come to see that, once this Christmas night is behind them, something big and basic will have changed in the way that Bea remembers her parents and sees the world. 

I've got to use that star.

_____________________  

She pulled her jacket over her shoulders, looking back at the dead baby, a gift for her blessed parents [she means that sarcastically, of course]. She stepped outside where Shorty was already waiting, and when he opened the door, she saw a bottle of beer between his legs. She pulled herself into the Pontiac and stared back at the porch light. It was the same car she would drive back from California herself a year later, alone and penniless, their little Frank, hungry, in the front seat beside her. 

What she'd done, Char had said. [She hasn't forgotten her daughter's accusation.] 

She put the cap back on the stripper and tossed the steel wool in the garbage, still holding the star. She'd had enough of refinishing for Christmas Eve. It was a holiday. There'd be more to get off and the legs to do before the dark cherry stain could reach into the old surface and pull out all the edges of the grain. 

She took Myron's flannel work-shirt off her shoulders and hung it from a nail, then used the rubber gloves to pick up the soggy steel wool and drop it in the can beside the door. She kicked clean newspapers over the clots of stripper that had dropped to the floor from the table, and rubbed the back of her hand over the clean wood. She walked over to the door and looked outside over the neighbor's fence at Christmas lights down the street where families stayed together [a bit of jealousy here]. 

She went inside and plugged in the coffee with her left hand and opened the refrigerator to a cake pan of brownies she'd made just that afternoon for Char. She slipped open the silverware drawer with her little finger and took out a paring knife, then carried the fudge back to the kitchen table, the medallion in the same hand as a paper plate she took from the counter. Behind her, the coffee maker snorted. It would be ready for Myron later. 

What would she do with the star? [That's the question I'm facing when I'm here in the writing of the story.] She sat at the table and laid it in front of her. Someone had lifted it finally from its secret place. It wasn't hidden anymore. She had to do something with it--her mother's desert star. 

She sliced through the pan of brownies in perfect squares, lifted one from the pan and ate it from the spatula, then took another piece from the pan and laid it on the edge of the dinner plate, then another and another. When she filled the plate with two circles of fudge, she reached up for wax paper to cover the bottom layer, then started in on more. 

It didn't really belong here in this house, she thought. Her mother had buried it for some reason she might never know or understand, stuck it away like a secret, and now it was unearthed. She reached in the junk drawer and found a piece of red thread, then poked the end through the weave of the star and held it up to dangle like a Christmas ornament. It needed to hang somewhere, she thought. Char already had the table. She could keep it herself, she thought--something from her mother, something from the grandma Char said she'd never had. [I'm running through some possibilities.]  

She emptied the pan, she ripped another piece of wax paper from the roll and covered the brownies completely. It was her mother's star, she thought, her mother's secret, something she would never under­stand, and her mother deserved it now, in the Indian way, part of herself, a memorial. [I've figured it out, but the mystery remains for you, I hope.] 

She left a note for Myron that said she loved him and not to wait up because she'd be back all right and she'd tell him about it in the morn­ing. Then she drove out of town, past the lights and the traffic until the city was a glowing dome in the darkness behind her and the edges of the mountains seemed a shroud thrown down at the horizon to cover stars in the dark desert sky. She knew she could find their graves in the darkness because they would be the only uncluttered stones in the cemetery, the only sites not decorated with offerings for the dead. She could find them. She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. [She's bound for her parents' graves in a cemetery at the mission.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children.  

_____________________________ 

And that's why. Let's just step lightly through this last part of the story. 

She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. ["Should have been," she tells herself. This self-criticism is new; the Bea at the beginning of the story would not have incriminated herself that way.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. [Way back when, this friend of mine told me he hadn't really stopped resenting his parents until he saw the many Native folks who came for the funeral. When he noticed specifically who his parents had given their lives for, he was overwhelmed, even thrilled. I bring it back here to suggest that Bea was equally moved by her brother's report.] She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies [this is a very Native thing to do, which is why Bea adopts the idea. If she puts the plate of brownies alongside the star, it will likely be the only decorations on her parents' graves--and her parents' graves may well be the only stones left undecorated since her parents' views of the afterlife differ clearly from Native rites and rituals. Protestant Christians don't "pray for the dead." Bea puts those things on her parents' grave on Christmas Eve because she blesses them, in all likelihood for the first time in her life.] because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children [ouch, but that she says it makes her just as human as you or I].  

A Prayer for the Dead -- v

If we were to analyze the arc of the story via traditional means, we could say, right now, that the story itself--the conflict that pushes it--is over. The story is finished because Bea has changed. She isn't who she was when the story began. For the first time in years, this Christmas Eve, Bea is allowing herself the space to think that maybe, just maybe, she had judged her mother and her mother's life too rigidly. Maybe her mother wasn't the pariah she'd built her to be in her mind, her memory, and her imagination.

But there needs to be more--the bit of story structure English teachers call the denouement, the untying or the "un-knot" of the story. Stories begin with knots, with tangled lines or messed-up conflicts. When those conflicts unravel, things get straightened out. 

Now, the writer--me--has to figure out how to artfully untie the knot--the major conflicts present in the story.

The first paragraph of this last section is rife with possibilities--she's pregnant, her parents don't know yet, and she's met at the door by a woman who brings a dead baby.

Such things happened frequently in the early days of the mission. Navajos had long nursed a deep fear of the dead, so much trauma, in fact, that they would bring dead bodies to the missionaries to take care of things; they knew that, for whatever reason, white people didn't harbor that fear. 

That's what's happening in the flashback Bea now explains.

 _____________________ 

The last prayer she'd spoken aloud she'd delivered over a dead baby brought by a Navajo woman to the mission house on a night both her parents were doing camp visits somewhere beneath the open desert sky. She'd come home herself earlier that afternoon without telling them she was on her way because she was pregnant with Frank, by Shorty Toledo. They knew about him-and she'd come home to tell them she was leaving with him, quitting the boarding school. 

It was 1946 and Shorty had come back from the war in his uniform, wild. She was seventeen, and when she'd come in the back door, bold and rebellious, she'd found the countertop stacked with empty cake pans and cookie sheets, and the Bible in its place on the table, its black covers worn away from the pages. She'd run through the house when no one answered her calls, thrown open the closet doors upstairs as if she would find her parents hiding from her, then slammed them shut behind her. 

She'd been home for an hour, maybe more, sitting on the steps, cry­ing in anger, when the bell rang. Some Navajos were afraid of evil spirits still inhabiting the dead. It had happened before. The front bell would ring and some woman would be standing there in silence, her long, pleated dress tossing softly in the breeze. If she would ask her father to come out to bury the dead, sometimes he would build a coffin in the horse barn while her mother packed extra clothes, baby clothes. 

"If Mother Van is not here," the woman had said, "then you will take him?" She nodded toward the bundle in her arms and held it out to her. "Pray now, please," the woman said. "Pray for my child. So Bea had taken the body, stiff beneath the blankets, and prayed then and there on the front steps, some chanted memory prayer that came to her in anger and remorse, pagan too, her father would have said-a prayer for the dead. She spoke only a few repeated words because she knew the woman needed only to hear supplication from the Anglo girl on the porch, Mother Van's own daughter. When she opened her eyes, the woman smiled, then started back up the road, leaving the body. 

[Bea's prayer was hardly that; yet, it's clear to her that it was just what this mourning young mother needed.]

She was seventeen, pregnant, full of silly plans. She came down off the steps and walked to the gate at the front of the yard, the weight of death in her arms, then ran a ways up the road. But the Indian woman set herself resolutely into the night, her agony gone. It would be useless to try to give the baby back, a betrayal. 

It was spring and the night's mellow warmth promised the summer that was surely to come, the dark skies embedded with stars. The wail of coyotes broke the desert darkness, and amid the snarls of Indian dogs shivering through the stillness, she stood there hoping to see her parents' headlights emerge from the horizon of darkness, still holding a dead baby. A baby-and not a baby. The child, stiff and heavy in her arms, was nothing but cold weight, host to legions of evil spirits. She opened the blankets to a face that paled even in the darkness, its eyes closed, a shock of dark hair clumped over its pointed gray forehead. 

Her parents would want to know who: maybe Eloise, or Christine, or Francy? "Did you see her face-maybe the way she wore her hair?" her mother would say. "Who was in the family way?" her father would ask, frantically. "What do you remember-something to distinguish her clothing-some jewelry maybe?-a sash?" her mother would wonder, and the moment they would hazard a guess, they would leave to find the woman, to comfort the pain. 

The night was moonless, she remembered, as dark as night can be on the desert, the cottonwoods behind the mission house full of mournful owls. She'd held the body with her left arm and gone into the house, pushed the light switches with her right hand until she got to the kitchen, where she laid it down, the blankets closed up tight around its face. When she looked out the window, she saw lights finally coming up the road. She glanced at the clock and knew it would be Shorty. 

She took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and some envelopes from between the pages of the Bible. "Mother," she scribbled in the margin, but even the word sounded wrong. She glanced again out toward the road. It had to be Shorty--he was coming too fast. How could she say what she had to? How could she explain why she was home? How could she tell them everything? "Mother," she wrote. "I was here and you two were gone." That was all.

____________________ 

One more bit to go, not much. 

"I was here and you two were gone" is a summary of what Bea believes her childhood to have been. This time, however, it's not a metaphor. She had so much to say and no one to say it to.

Prayer for the Dead — iv

There's a significant revelation in the next two paragraphs. You'll see it. Remember, what I want to do with this story is somehow bring Bea back to peace. It's an easy thing to do--just introduce the Holy Spirit. But if my writing is going to score with people who don't share my view of "revelation," I've got to make the shimmering moments glisten. I can't simply bring in the Big Guns: ". . .and there stood Jesus before her. . ."

It's Christmas Eve remember, and Bea is alone--not a night to be alone. Not only that, but she just got a tongue-lashing from her daughter. And now this little piece of homespun craft carefully sealed up beneath a layer of linoleum her parents had put there to prevent extra wear. 

___________________________________

Bea pulled her gloves up above the wrists and took two steel wool pads from the box on the shelf, balled them together for heft, then scoured a two-inch circle down to bare wood to see which direction the grain ran.

But if her mother had wanted to put the medallion out of her mind forever, she could have walked any direction from her back door and simply buried it—no one would ever have found it. She wouldn't have to slide it into an envelope and hide it beneath the surface of the
table she used every day. She wanted it there, Bea thought. She needed it there for some reason. Maybe late at night, her husband out on camp ministry, her own children miles away at the mission school, after a dozen Indian children had eaten her cake and listened to Bible stories, she could shut the door, steal a few moments alone here at the table, stretching her fingers over something like a fetish, an outline so faint she was the only one who knew it existed. Her mother the heathen. Maybe the two of them were more alike than she'd ever thought.

She stripped off the gloves, picked up the star, and studied the knots at each of the points, remembering how easily the shuttle flitted be­tween her mother's fingers as she turned out stitches so effortlessly that the whole action seemed instinct. Her shuttle was inlaid, she remembered, turquoise and something dark--maybe petrified wood. It might have been a gift, something from an Indian woman, almost certainly Indian-made.

She turned the star in her fingers. Maybe she never knew her mother at all.

She pulled a glove back on her hand and picked up the steel wool. Maybe if she were to find the tatting, she thought--that carpetbag her mother kept in the bottom drawer of the buffet--maybe there would be more. She looked up at the clock. She could still call Peter. It was early, and Myron would have lots more stops. She scoured the stripper she'd painted on the surface in firm scrapes, pushing it away from her and with the grain into globs thick with dirt and finish and scraps of the old adhesive, leaving bare wood beneath.

She found her brother's number penciled in the back of the book hanging by a shoestring from the phone. "Peter," she said when he finally picked up the receiver, "it's your sister. Listen, I know it's Christmas Eve, but I was wondering-" she stopped, trying to arrange a question she hadn't yet worded. "Mom used to do tatting."

"Bea," he said, "are you drunk?"

"No. Listen, she used to do tatting--remember?"

"Tatting," he repeated, not as a question.

"Fine little things, like doilies. She'd sit in the chair by the pole lamp-nights? You know those things she'd made to go on the arms of the sofa? Little handwork stuff, lace."

“Okay, okay,” he said.

"When you cleaned up her place, did you find that carpetbag, her sewing things--did you find a little shuttle? --she called it a shuttle. Silver ­inlaid, like Zuni stuff?"

"What's it look like?" he said.

"Thin, streamlined-like a lipstick tube, a little bigger--a spool in the middle. She'd wind the string around that spool--"

"I don't think I saw it," he said. "You want it?"

What could she say? When her father had died, Peter had asked whether there was anything of her parents she wanted, anything at all, and she had told him to give everything away, every last bit. "Dump what you can't sell," she'd told him.

"You okay, Sis? What's got into you?" he asked.

"I just wondered," she said.

"It must be worth something," he said.

"It is," she said.

"How much?"

“I just wondered if you saw it anywhere--tiny as a minnow, even shorter. Inlaid. She had it for years.”

He laughed. "How much is it worth, Bea?" he said.

"A lot."

'Tm down to one box, here--mostly little stuff. I gave away most of the sewing stuff. I could look, but if I'd have known that you wanted it--"

"Would you?" Bea asked him.

"Now?"

"Please?"

"It's Christmas Eve. How much is this gadget worth?"

"Trust me," she told him.

"Silver thing--inlaid. How big?"

"Thumb-size."

When he put down the phone, she heard the low pitch of adults laughing softly, interrupted by busy voices of children. A shuttle, it was second nature to her mother to use it. It would slip between her fingers almost as if it were alive, even while she was reading or talking. She cradled the receiver in her neck and held the star up before her eyes.

"I looked through everything I got here--you know, there's some stuff you might like, Bea. I know how you feel--"

"You don't have it?"

"There's really not much here anymore, you know. It's been three months since the funeral."

"You never saw it?"

"What're you getting for it anyway? Must be worth a mint."

"It's not that," Bea told him.

"Then what is it?"

Tell him, she thought, go on and tell him. "I want it myself, Peter," she said. "It's something of mother's, and I guess I just want it."

He was stunned, then chuckled a little. "Is that right? Christmas spirit or something?--you're sure you're not drinking?"

"I wondered if you had it," she said. "She used to work at nights sometimes, and that shuttle slipped through her fingers as if it were alive. When we were little-"

"I don't have it, sis," he said. "I wish I did, for your sake--and hers too."

''I know, I know," she said. 'Tm sorry."

"You are--really?"

'Tm sorry for not asking--"

"Oh," he said. "You wouldn't believe how much stuff I left there." There was laughter behind him. "I only wished you'd asked."

“I figured your daughter might like the table--it's an antique, you know?"

“I know—it’s here.”

"You’ll refinish it for her?"

She waited. "It's a lot of work," she told him. "I don't think I got the time."

She heard her brother breathe heavily over the phone. "Bea, you should have seen them at the funeral--all the people. They came from miles around. Seriously, hundreds of people. Remember how the folks used to spend years without seeing one new face in that little church?--years, Bea. Not one. If it was a business, they would have shut it down. But you should have seen the people. They came from all over the reservation--"

"Merry Christmas, Peter," she said.

He stopped, waited. "Same to you, sis," he told her.

She hung up the phone and looked at the star as if there were more to the mystery, more to her mother than she'd ever thought. Then she brought it up to her eyes in a fist.

_____________________ 

So this friend of mine, who was reared on the reservation, an MK (missionary kid) told me he was all of 35 before he could forgive his parents. And he knew the exact moment he could forgive them--it was at his father's funeral when literally hundreds of people showed up. He had had no idea. They were there for Rev. Van. All those people--all those Native folks--he couldn't believe it. Made him see so much of his life in a different, wider setting.

And now I have to write my way out of this story. There's already a new interest and sympathy, but there's the matter of that little embroidered thing she found buried beneath the linoleum and the hardwood beneath.

One more day.

Hope in the Longest Night

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

I really do love this one.

Listen in here,

Prayer for the Dead -- iii

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

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

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

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

__________________


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

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

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

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

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

The arrogance of her answer kept them from asking again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prayers for the Dead -- ii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Tm serious," Char told her.

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

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

"Been that way for years," Bea said.

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

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

“I know what day it is.”

"I just thought I'd mention it."

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

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

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

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

"I got Myron to tend to--"

"Tomorrow, then?"

"Tomorrow what?"

"Tomorrow church."

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

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

Bea let that line alone.

"Did you hear me?" Char said.

"What's that?"

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

“What was that again?”

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

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

_____________________

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

The story will run 'till Christmas.

______________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________________

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

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .while you may be found.”

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

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

Sometimes it seems that God has simply left the building.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is God. We are not.

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

Brooding Upon the Waters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Thanks -- Watchman deployment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just thought I'd mention it. With thanks.

'Possums"

Whether or not they were the first Americans no one will ever know. What we do know is that the word “opossum” originates early in American history, a gift from Algonquin people, with whom it existed in a slightly different spelling and meant, essentially, "white beast."  Captain John Smith recorded it already in 1608. 

But calling an opossum a "beast" is a stretch. A grizzly is beast for sure. A buffalo? --of course. But possums are a footnote beneath a page of American beasts. They're fat little guys to start with, so shy they'll go stiff, freeze so tight they take on a particular scent and go dead-rigid--involuntarily too. They're the only American mammal that can be scared silly. 

Assessing beauty is, of course, impossible, but that doesn't mean we can't rig a scale. To me, a mink is a far sight more beautiful than a muskrat, and a mule makes a quarter horse look like an angel. An opossum?--you can't help but wonder exactly what the Creator of heaven and earth was thinking.

Years ago, when I was sitting at a kitchen table trying to painstakingly grade papers, one of the brothers or sisters came up on our deck and sat on our picnic table bench in the middle of a dark night, just sat there and looked at me. 

Of course, I wasn't scared--it was only an opossum. But horrified?--sure. Ugly?--no kidding, nose like a pig and a tail like a fat snake. Let's be blunt: Since 1608, as far as I know no possum ever won a beauty contest, much less tried. They're homely, downright homely. Try to find one at your local pet store.

Years ago, a neighbor couple across the alley decided to take down an old garage. When they did, they chased a few baby opossums out of a nest they hadn't known was there. It just so happens that some neighborhood kids, including ours, were close by when that old farm couple simply up and killed those kits, whacked them with a shovel.

I understand how, on the farm, amidst the animals, life and death is pretty much an everyday thing. I get that. Anyone whose lived on a farm has likely murdered something or other alive--too many feral cats, too many runt piglets for available spigots. Those old folks who whacked baby possums in front of my kids thought nothing of crunching their little skulls, one by one, and tossing death into the garbage. Today, forty years later, my kids still remember just about everything about that morning.

Maybe, like so much else, opossums have to die before we care. On the very first night I was legal to drive my dad's '64 Chev, I hit one--they're not quick--on a country road west of town. It was prom night, my first prom, and most of the rest of the night all I could think about was having killed that lousy opossum. 

Last year on a hike along the Floyd River, a kid came up the path toward me as if I wasn't the enemy. I walked right up to my boot, smelled it, then kept on walking as if I were of little consequence. He/she was small and likely freezing in midwinter, but I didn't offer him a place in front of our fireplace.

Standing beside me right now in our new place is a few canvas prints I had made, waiting to take a place on our wall. One of them is a close-up portrait of that little kid opossum who, on the banks of the Floyd, came right up as if I was just another cottonwood. 

Cute little thing really. That's him up top of the page.

For months that little guy--he's called a "joey," like his Aussie relatives--stayed in his mom's pouch. They're North America's only real marsupial, you know.

Oh, and I forgot: you got to hand it to 'em. . .opossums love ticks and eat more than their share. Isn't that wonderful? 

All that bad stuff I said?--let me just reconsider a bit.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 32

“Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”

 I read an interview some time ago with Susan Cheever, a novelist and non-fiction writer, who is—perhaps to her own dismay—likely better known as the daughter of the now deceased John Cheever, a highly celebrated short story writer.  For several reasons, that interview won’t leave me alone, and one of them is her claim that, to her as a child, her father’s short stories horrified her. 

 She remembers a time when her father used a ski trip she had taken as a base for a story about a little girl who dies on exactly that kind of outing. “In my family,” for her and her family, Susan Cheever says, “being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful” than finding themselves in portrayed in non-fiction, a memoir.

That line in that interview nearly decked me because it had never dawned on me that my family might experience a similar horror, victims, in a way, of their father’s imaginative “use” of their lives. I’d never, ever considered the grotesque puzzle I might have left with any of them, finding semblances of themselves and each other twisted and turned into something at once bitterly unrecognizable and sweetly familiar.  I can’t speak for John Cheever, but I honestly never had a clue—I really didn’t.

 Haunting questions arise unbidden.  Was my own playful creativity the occasion for their pain?  Was my joy their misery?  Should I have spent so much of my adult life trying to write stories?  Was the way I’ve lived my life dead wrong? 

 And I ask myself this:  if I had read what Susan Cheever says when I was thirty, would I have dedicated so much of my time and enthusiasm to writing?

 Perhaps it is a mark of the deep stain of sin itself, but now, looking back, I honestly can’t imagine myself not writing. For better or for worse, I guess, sitting here at this desk has become, for me, a “habit of being,” as Flannery O’Connor said. Sometimes, as the Bible says, our best deeds are as filthy rags.

I feel myself in David’s own shoes here in verse six: “Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”  His impulse to tell the story is, I believe, the impulse of most writers—and, for that matter, most humans. We want and need to tell the stories we find most meaningful, to share our joy or sadness. We want everyone to hear. Not all of us are evangelists, but we all have a gospel. We all want to testify.          

Psalm 32 is a roadmap for those who need to find a path to forgiveness.  Psalm 32 shows us the way.  Psalm 32 leads us to divine waters. But the story David tells has never saved a soul, and neither will a million sermons on this text, or, for that matter, this mediation.  Only God’s grace—through his son’s gigantic sacrifice—can do that.

I wonder if David knew that he was writing “the Bible.”  I wonder if he understood as he strung these words out in front of him that he was being directed by the Holy Spirit’s favor. I wonder if he ever considered his words were not his, but God’s.

 Somehow, I doubt it.  And because I do, I find a refuge in his inability to keep silence.  He’s got to speak, to sing.  With the joy of forgiveness bubbling up inside, he can’t stanch the music from his soul.  He’s got to yap, to tell.

Even his joy, his testimony, his story requires forgiveness.  Everything he is—even his ecstasy—stands in need of grace. 

May God almighty forgive me, and him, and all of us, as he promises, as he does, and as he will.    

A couple of decades ago

 

What was I learning, twenty years ago? I haven't really noted it plainly or definitively, but I'm coming to understand that photographs taken in a certain slant of sun are blessed with a Midas touch. When dawn burnishes everything, it makes anything and everything lovely. Look, this picture wouldn't be worth a thing if it weren't for the golden touch of an early morning sun on a blanket of fresh snow. Is this a beautiful shot? There's no accounting for taste, so my answer may suit me but no one else. 

But twenty years ago, after a blizzard, I went out to on an abandoned farm just a couple miles north of Lebanon, getting there early enough (these were shot December 15, 2005) to grab a bit of that gilded look that, in this place especially--an abandoned place--gives old junk a richness that's almost angelic. 

That's what I was learning twenty years ago after a morning outing with my precious camera and enough of a blizzard to bestow quilts all around.

Have a look. 

Are any of these pictures spectacular? Nope, but all of them are comely, made so by the gracious reach of an early morning sun. 

This week, a chunk of land some place close to Orange City brought (take a breath) 30K an acre. You read that right--$30,000. Made headlines around the state. 

I bring that up because these shots are hard to find these days; the land is so expensive that abandoned farms are all but gone.

That's sad if you fool around with a camera. 

Here's the most interesting shot I took that morning long ago. Takes a while to "read" it, but it's my favorite at least, mostly because it's fun.  

p.s. I don't think these files have ever been out of my hard drive before. It's kind of fun giving them an audience they've never had.