Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, 

nor the moon by night.”

It may be hard to believe but that old kid’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been around now for almost sixty years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness.

For years, our grandson would search the dark sky. “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he has to be sure that it’s up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121. Goodnight Moon such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we, 75 years ago, were lost in what seemed endless rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink. For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead. An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it. Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it.

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course. But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams.

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of us who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, truly a blessing. God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in scant and scary light of the moon. So, well, "goodnight moon."

Highland, July 2013

There are a ton of these shots in my bank of old pics--a stratified prairie sky showing off its fanciest colors out east , a stage for awaiting the soon-to-arrive dawn. Sometimes you find treasures at places you could not have imagined. One has to learn to allow the scene to do its own work.

Long ago I stumbled on this chunk of ground without knowing a thing--or even imagining--the treasures it held. That weather-beaten tree stands, mostly alone, against untold acres of wide-brimmed farmland. Once there was a town here, but all that is left these days is a cemetery of only a few stones, an immigrant Norwegian-American cemetery (the names notably not Dutch). Those who might remember the place--it was determined to live here in this new country--have long ago departed.

Should you  spot this from the blacktop, you would see nothing particular; but out there in the middle of the section there's just something about the place that calls me back again and again because a constellation of its ordinary images make the place a scene that almost always delivers (not simply because it is a cemetery!)

Those faraway lights are Sioux Center's. 

Lebanon/Highland captured my attention for years. These shots were a visit on June 16, 2013, just a year after I retired from a lifetime of teaching.

Happiness

It's a gem I found six years ago, put up here for all kinds of people to see, then, sadly, never hit the publish. Thus, while it appears forever in my list of posts, no one else, save Joyce Sutphen readers, ever saw it. 

But it's hers, a Joyce Sutphen poem, a woman I never met. I've never heard from her read several collections of poems, even though she lives not so far away, regionally that is. She is an emeritus professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus University in St. Peter, MN, lives and works in Lutheran Minnesota. Every once in a while I have spent time with her poems and always found her world both recognizable and blessedly worthy. 

I intended sometime back in 2001 to create a post out of this poem--and never did. Just happened to turn it up this morning, six years after leaving it in the blog. I don't know why I never hit the Publish button, but the poem is as worthy today as it was then. So, a little late maybe, but just as healthy as ever--this Joyce Sutphen poem titled something hugely impossible to define and therefore compelling to try:

Happiness
by Joyce Sutphen

This was when my daughters were just children
playing on the rocky shore of the lake,

their hair in braids, their bright-colored jackets
tied around their waists. It was afternoon,

the shadows falling away, their faces
glowing with light. Whatever we said then

(and it must have been happy; it must have
been hopeful) is lost as I am now lost

from that life I lived. This was when nothing
that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted

was happiness, pure happiness, simple
as strawberries and cream in a saucer,

as curtains floating from a window sill,
as small pairs of shoes arranged in a row.

What's  unmistakable is the insistence of its regret, a conceit in poetry as old as any stanzas you might consider; the confession in the poem is as far from happiness as you might imagine ("Whatever we said then (and must have been happy; it must have/been hopeful") is lost as I am now lost"--a sad dark and soul-full confession. even though the list of unforgotten images prompt a fleeting smile.  

If I say this Sutphen is very "Lutheran," I might just as well say it's very Calvinist; there a mixture of "strawberries and cream in a saucer" set out as if to sweeten a dogged unsweetened reality: ". . .This is when nothing/that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted/was happiness," she says in a confession not to be missed. 

Simply to awaken our senses to her wistful moments is a gift.

Hegseth holds forth

Here's how AI describes D-Day, June 6, 1944: "D‑Day was a 50‑mile‑wide, multi‑national assault involving 156,000 troops, 7,000 ships, 12,000 aircraft, and 23,000 airborne soldiers, opening the door to the liberation of Europe."

That's a terrifying description, but a very helpful summary of an event that altered the world we live in yet today. The Allied invasion on June 6, 1944, was massive--just imagine how much sky is required for 12,000 aircraft, how much English channel it requires to float 7000 ships. 

D-Day remembrance celebrations are held worldwide, of course, since so much of the world was tightly wound in to the war-time fantasies of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The presence of the U.S. of A. was unmistakable, and while, in judgement, it's altogether possible for this "sweet land of liberty" to look past the immense contributions of other Allied nations, it's impossible not to acknowledge the heft of American gifts, including much of the action on Utah Beach (most fiercely defended by the Axis powers) and the entire paratrooper fleet dropped into enemy territory before dawn on June 6.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a decorated war veteran himself, spoke last week at the D-Day Commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery, and used the occasion to warn celebrants that the problems created by immigration were just as threatening as the Axis powers' taking over Europe during the early years of World War II.

The speech--and especially that comparison--was roundly criticized, as it well should have been. 

The very real problems created by significant immigration--especially illegal immigration--have no contemporary corollary, especially illegal immigration, which is undertaken only by those who would like to find freedom somewhere far away from a culture where they live, a culture in which liberty has literal meaning.

Where does the Secretary get such errant comparisons?

Easy. From his boss.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

  “The Mighty One, God, the LORD, 

speaks and summons the earth 

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.”

 As far as I know, the county in which I live, Sioux County, Iowa, has no citizens of Sioux descent. What’s more, the town in which I lived for forty years—Sioux Center—is in no way a "center for the Sioux."  For most of 150 years now, it’s been a center for the Dutch, who were and are of no close relation to the Sioux. There lies a tale, of course, one that everyone knows: here and elsewhere across the plains, we won and they lost.

 A friend of mine, a congenial soul who loved repairing bridges we built with our prejudices, once asked a Sioux religious man to visit the college where I taught, asked him to speak in chapel.  Because chapel was a religious event, our guest took with him a sacred pipe.  Before he spoke, he lit the pipe, then turned to the four directions and led paleface kids through a ceremony meant to evoke God’s presence.

The symbolism, Black Elk says, works something like this:  the south brings warmth and new life in spring; the east, peace and light; the north is the source of cold, and thereby strength of character; and the from the west comes thunder and rain.  By raising the pipe to the four directions, the Lakota traditionally believe the spirits of the directions—all part of the God of the universe, Wakan Tanka—were being invoked for aid and comfort and trust throughout the ceremony.

 Such things simply aren’t done in the center for the Dutch. Some kids hit the warpath. What on earth was a pagan doing with holy smoke, bowing to the four winds or whatever?  The whole thing was, to some of them—and their parents--off-the-map heathen.

The opening lines of the mighty song of Psalm 50 make me wonder if the psalmist—whoever he was—would mind beginning worship with some sense of God’s hugeness, some kind of ritual meant to point towards a deity who is forever outside of time and space.      

 Honestly, I hear more Lakota in verse one than in a lot of evangelical Christianity.  Interesting, isn’t it, that the psalmist actually begins with three names—“the mighty one, God, the Lord”—each of which, in ancient Hebrew defined slightly different dimensions.  It’s as if the poet really wants to get all of this deity covered.  He doesn’t want to miss a characteristic.  He knows he can’t get all of God in focus, but, in humility, he wants to do the best he can, so he invokes with every possible name.

The second half of verse one moves east to west, not unlike the Sioux ritual.  There’s no sacred pipe here, but it doesn’t take all that much imagination for us to picture the possibility that some ancient Hebrew may have gestured just as broadly as that Native guy in our chapel.  To me, the line just feels Native.

One pair of seemingly irreconcilable characteristics of our God is that he is, at once, both imminent—right here beside us—and transcendent—forever somewhere beyond us.  The opening lines of Psalm 50 force us to consider his transcendence. Most of us, I think, would prefer a teddy bear.

 In fact, it’s not all that difficult to make verse one sound, well, primitive.  Give me a pipe, or an eagle feather and a smudge pot, I bet I could recite it in our college chapel this week and set some sweetly self-righteous kids on a heresy hunt. 

 But then, there’s not a Lakota in the neighborhood.  

June 6

June 7 will forever be "June 7," but to me June 6 will forever be something different, not because someone I knew was there on a beach in Normandy, but because of what went down there. Everyone connected with the secrecy of the operation on D-Day knew that the invasion would cost the Allied powers thousands of lives and it did--over 4000, with an equal number on the German side, if not more, considerably more. 

I don't know what goes on today, but the Memorial Day celebrations in my hometown, way back when, used to include--feature, in fact--the hometown vets from World War II. There were dozens of them when I was a boy, the wars in Europe and the South Pacific only a decade behind us.

But one of those vets always lit my childhood imagination more than others because my dad gave that man special honors, not because of memorable bouts of unquestionable heroism but because of where that WWII vet served--he was there, at Normandy, on June 6. Honestly, I don't know if my own perception is right--whether a man named "Linky" was there on the beach or not--but I know his face will forever be the face of D-Day in my mind because I'm quite sure my dad told me, long ago, that he was, and my boyhood imagination placed him there, on those killing beaches. 

"Linky" made it, even though 4000 of his buddies did not. He and his family lived just outside of town in a big corner house where he pulled on his khakis every Memorial Day for the parade. To my mind, he wasn't just a vet--lots of men my dad's age were vets; he was special because he was in one of those barge-like landing crafts, the LCVPs, as they were called; he was among those emptied onto Omaha Beach with thousands of others, many hundreds of whom would never move another step. Linky made it. When he'd march by on Memorial Day, I used to dream of the stories he could tell--if he chose to, and not every vet did. He was there.

My dad spent D-Day in the South Pacific aboard the kind of tugboat whose job it was to move battleships around foreign harbors. I don't know this for certain, but I can't help but believe that he never pulled on his Coast Guard uniform after the war because he believed in his heart that because he'd never seen action, spent his years of service on a tugboat, Memorial Day was meant for the Linkys, not the guys who never heard a bullet slash the air. 

Today is Linky's day--that's what I can't help feeling. Last weekend we went to Pressure, a finely crafted movie whose heart is in the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944. 

My mother-in-law lost her fiancé this morning, 82 years ago, June 6, 1944. His name was TerHorst, and he was trained as an engineer. His job that morning to demolish the "hedgehogs," as they were called, the sharp obstructions meant to keep the Allies off the beaches. I don't think he got out of his LCVP. 

In this country, that June 6 is not a holiday doesn't mean it's not somehow remembered, even by those who wouldn't be born until after the end of the Second World War.

I wasn't born until 1948, but that doesn't mean I don't remember. Lots of us haven't and won't. 

And that, I'd like to think, is as it should be.

This morning I'm thankful for an abundance of gifts on this June 6.

Kit Carson and Singing Grass

 

 Christopher Carson, people said, would expose himself to the full light of the campfire only when he lit a pipe. His closest companions were his pistols and the rifle he kept beside him even when he slept.

Daniel Boone stood no taller than 5'8"--not a peewee, but by no standards was he physically formidable. For the record, Davy Crockett, coonskin cap and all, was no bigger; in fact, Crockett would have measured up equally had the two of them ever stood toe to toe. The real Kit Carson, who ranks with Boone and Crockett in legendary prominence as American frontiersman, was even smaller--5'6" in stocking feet, wiry and by no means muscle-bound. Mythically, however, Kit Carson was a giant.

For a man who lacked any formal education, Carson was smart, even cagey, a quick learner who determined in a hurry how to get along in the American frontier of the early 1800s.  As a trapper and frontiersman, he could converse--I'm serious!--in Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Piute and Ute, and he knew the sign language used by mountain men throughout the West.

I don't need to say that the diminutive Carson was a tough cookie, but he was, even though he was never, ever so full of himself that he'd tell you he was. He just was. 

He must have looked like a wimp to a French-Canadian trapper named Joseph Chouinard. Seems an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, quite the looker, people say, got courted by both of them at a "Rendezvous" somewhere around what would become Fort Laramie, in what would become southern Wyoming. The event--for the record--would be the last annual "Rendezvouz" on the Upper Plains, an annual event when the entire congregation of mountain men went sort of nuts, binging for a week or so, drinking and gambling, swapping stories and then doing more drinking and gambling. Was, for certain, a high, old time.

Oh yes, and "womaning." In other words, a little of everything, and not a Sunday School picnic.  The sharp edge between Kit Carson and this  French trapper named Chouinard was put there by an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, who found herself the subject of both men's attention because neither of them could take their eyes off her.

Guns were drawn, shots were fired, and in what must have been an unusual duel--it was on horseback. Chouinard's shots struck nothing of any danger on Kit Carson, but Carson's shots ripped the man's thumb off his hand. Singing Grass left the shooting match with Kit Carson, who, by all accounts, had been already her chosen victor.

Together, Carson and his French wife had two girls; the complications of the second birth took the life of Singing Grass and sent Carson into deep grief.

Kit Carson was a hero to thousands of 19th century readers, who ate up the Carson stories regardless of the stories' authenticity. 

And he was, you better believe, at best a part-time hero. Ask any Navajo about Kit Carson and the Long Walk, and be ready to field some authentic anger, a wild west guy whose famous pistols, even at night, were always half-cocked.

At least we know he's no commie

  

   "Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” 

Sleep well tonight. The Nightwatchman is awake, tweeting old fears. 

A poisoned candidacy

Feenstra, with glasses, behind the President

He is, by any definition save one, my brother. He is kindred, not family but closer to me than anyone else making national news this morning. He is--or was--a leading Republican candidate to become Governor of Iowa, his home state. He is--and will forever be--a child of Sioux County, Iowa, a man whose birthright is "Dutch Reformed," by birthright, if not by choice.

He grew up here, went to private, Christian schools, Dordt College (now University), where, several years later, (as did I) he taught. In the doctrinal language of the heritage he and I share, he's a "covenant child," born and baptized in a tradition whose history and character I've wandered through for most of my life.

I should, one would think, support his candidacy to be the next Governor of the state of Iowa (he is running, or was, until last night). Not only was he running, he was also the favorite, given his husky endorsement by the President just last week. Trump was for Randy Feenstra for Gov. "He's in," people thought.

Sorry. Yesterday, despite that hefty, prized endorsement, he lost. He has conceded.

Every news network used his loss as one of its headlines after yesterday's series of primary elections. He wasn't alone on the ballot; he was one of three candidates for gov, only two of which were positioned to grab the nomination. He came in second, lost the race by just 1500 votes. His loss was a huge story, a national headline because of someone else: he held the golden support of a man who's shown himself once again, recently, to be the ticket to victory. This time it may have been the kiss of death; Trump's support didn't do the job--his hand-picked boy and Dordt's most famous graduate went down to defeat.

And I voted against him. I didn't campaign against him, didn't say a word or write a sentence saying mean things or disparaging his candidacy; but neither did I vote for him, a fine man, a brother Hollander. I didn't vote against him; I voted in the Democratic primary for the man who did win his party's nomination--Josh Turek, a relative newcomer who opposes most everything our President, and Randy Feenstra, stands for. 

And there lies the difference. I don't know if it occurred by choice or request, but President Trump's endorsement of Randy Feenstra soured me. I wasn't registered to vote Republican anyway, but even if I had been, Trump's endorsement would have sunk anyone else's candidacy in my estimation too.

What the headlines missed is the significant issue of private education. Recently, in the state, more funding has found its way into private (in this case, Christian) education. Trump supports it, so did Randy Feenstra, with his family, his politics, and his contributions. 

That commitment was likely sufficient--even here-- to bring down his candidacy. He did well, just not good enough to win, and the difference, last night, between winning and losing, in his case, could well have been the voters, even here in Sioux County, his home, many of whom have opposed increased state aid for private education. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I'm sure, some people who love Trump don't like state funding of private education. No national news sources I saw this morning mentioned that in their analysis.

I'm sad about it, but, truthfully, I feel more sad that a man with his moral framework (which is to say, a moral framework I understand) would covet the endorsement of a man like Donald Trump (28 tweets in the last 24 hours). 

For me, Trump's support--and Feenstra's whole-hearted acceptance thereof--was cause enough to avoid him and his poisoned candidacy.

What didn't happen on 6/5/44

Truth be known, we didn't go to Pressure, the movie, because I'm a history buff. We didn't go because my father-in-law walked over D-Day beaches two weeks after the first wave of Allies, nor did we go because a Lakota woman I knew took precious amounts of her time to tell me her story, a nurse, right there in the middle of action that took place two weeks or so after the invasion. Nor did we go because my mother-in-law lost a fiancé on Omaha Beach just after he walked into the channel and departed the landing craft. 

We went for a pretty crappy reason, really--because we were bored. The local theater was offering Pressure, a movie I'd seen advertised featuring a portly Eisenhower (who wasn't skinny) in full uniform at a beach all too reminiscent of a half dozen truly memorable beaches, stories about D-Day, this one, strangely enough, about the weather. I'd like to say we went for some truly noble reason--after all, I'm a registered WWII buff. One of the major motivators was sheer boredom on a holiday weekend--and Pressure, strangely named, was on the big screen right here in town. 

We looked, we found, we went, and we loved it. Number me among those who find it hard to say what I just did--how can anybody love a war movie? Okay, talk among yourselves, but I did.

Let me take the edge off that claim, I really liked it, okay?  It's hard to say you "loved" D-Day or anything connected with the carnage on Normandy's beaches. But I remember what the theater looked like where I sat through D-Day, the first of the really big shows. Band of Brothers has a permanent place in my memory, and, of course, Saving Private Ryan is wholly unforgettable.

It's hard to know where I'd put Pressure (the pun is adorable, but silly--absolutely nothing about D-Day is "adorable") in the list; what I'll say unequivocally is that what we saw on Saturday night earned a place in the best of the D-Day films. I was captivated the entire time, even though there's far less blood than there could have been, far less carnage, far less battlefield ugliness than anyone human would like to see. 

Pressure doesn't glorify action, it sets up heroism where it dwells most abundantly, with decisions that have to be made in every battle and almost always determine at least something of ultimate battle outcome. In Pressure, it's the decision of the weatherman: is the ocean going to be on the side of the Allies, or is it going to arise in defense  of the defenders already set up and in place for a battle just about everyone had to know would determine the outcome of what Hitler jump-started in Poland.

Does it glorify the carnage? War movies can do that, but Pressure doesn't. The battle itself is horrifying and bloody, as was the invasion; but the conflict between one man's determined vision of the weather--what it might be--on June 5, the day plotted for the invasion against the immense pressure created by months of American troops in England. 

One man says no, and that one man's refusal to reshape his forecast makes all the difference. He's the protagonist of the story, but the movie doesn't cast him as hero. Instead, it's the paunchy Allied Supreme Commander with the sad comb-over, a warrior America chose to call Ike, who chose to believe the scorned forecaster who told him to wait.

Which he did. It's likely, the movie claims, that the Allies waiting on June 5 made all the difference.

The praise for Pressure hasn't been all that glorious, but I say seeing it on the big screen is worth shelling out the bucks for a ticket or two. In my estimation, Pressure is really a great story, very much worth getting up off the couch and back in the theater.

We did. It was terrific!

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 50

“And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, 

for God himself is judge.” Psalm 50:1

 My uncle told me about it. I’m not at all sure my father even knew. He said that he’d once heard that his own grandparents, the immigrant Dutch Calvinist folk who came to this country in the late 1860s, were buried in the cemetery in Orange City, Iowa, just a hop, skip, and jump from where I’d just taken a job. “You ought to look once,” he said.

I don’t remember what finally tugged me out to that graveyard. At the time, I knew no one else who’d been buried there; but finally I went, dutifully determined to find that headstone. I scouted the oldest parts of that cemetery, where the ancient headstones stand like marbled tongue depressors, leaning in various degrees of sleepy repose. No Schaaps—or at least not C. C. and his wife Neeltje. Maybe my uncle, the family historian, was wrong, I thought. I kept looking.

I found it in the neighborhood of newer graves, a barrel-like, granite monument clearly carved with the family names, relevant dates, and a scripture verse, in Dutch, on each side, for each grandparent.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt right then, and likely impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced such a palpable sense of rooted-ness. Even though I’d never stepped a foot in that cemetery before, I felt, strangely enough, as if I were home. Does that make sense? There was an unmistakable sense of life in the grave at my feet.

It’s 110 years now, since C. C. Schaap died, 102 since Neeltje passed away; but once I found the spot, I felt as if I’d been somehow summoned, and those great-grandparents, who died long before my father was born, were looking me over—Grandpa nodding, Grandma turning up my collar against the cold prairie wind.

Just three days ago I went back to that cemetery, took a nephew out to visit. When we found that barrel-like monument back, there they were, smiling, as grandparents do.
I think of that this morning, as I consider this line from Psalm 50—how heavenly spectators stand there in awe before the Judge. I can’t help but imagine what that Orange City cemetery might look like, the ancient ones standing atop their monuments, a most astounding crowd of faithful.

One of the dreams of the Ghost Dancers in the late 1890s was that “the old ones” would return from the dust, would walk silently into camp and take their places around the campfires. It was a beatific and celestial Lakota vision.

And it’s here in Psalm 50. “The heavens declare the glory of God” is the central line of Psalm 19, a psalm that reverences the heavenly preaching God does each day in sermons the wide open skies proclaim. But here there’s a homily with a different blessing, a new twist, a cloud of witnesses, a ton of great-grandparents, waiting for the word of the Lord.

If I could choose a place to be when such a court is assembled, I think I might choose a cemetery, just to be there when all those ancient tongue depressors fall on cue and the righteous emerge.

Wouldn’t that be fun? There’d be lots to talk about, lots of songs, lots of stories, lots of smiles.

Memorial Day - finis

continued from yesterday. . . 

A couple  of years ago, I spotted a cross in an American war-dead cemetery far south in the Netherlands.  The name is not particularly familiar to me, but it’s recognizably Dutch, as am I.  From what I know of names and origins, I'm guessing he was from Marion County, somewhere around Pella, which means that sometime back more than a century ago before the man died--on his way to Berlin--some of his ancestors left Holland with Dominie Scholte, when that Leiden intellectual took off for the prairies of Iowa with a significant flock of followers, pious folks all.

Sgt. John Van Ooyen may well have died here, someplace close, maybe even not all that far from the neighborhoods his ancestors once left behind forever. Something got him--a bullet maybe, some anti-aircraft, maybe fire from a tank.

All I know is his rank, his company, his Dutch name, and the fact that he's one of 8000 American war dead who are commemorated here, even though what's left of his bones may well be elsewhere.

It's stunning to stand amid all those white crosses and to realize that what's there--row after row after row--is barely a decimal point to the many others who also never came back to places like Marion County, Iowa, or Mille Lacs County, Minnesota. There were thousands and thousands and thousands--and thousands more.

For what? For freedom. For righteousness. For peace. Sixty years ago, for Sgt. John Van Ooyen, an end to the thoughtless slaughter of millions the Nazis thought not good enough for their stupid master race.

My goodness, it cost a lot.

And then there's this. Beyond Van Ooyen’s cross, just a couple more back in a row to the right, is a white star of David--a Jewish guy.

I wonder if this Dutch kid from rural Iowa ever thought about the fact that he was dying for some New York Jewish kid too. I wonder whether that thought was in his head when he enlisted, or was drafted. I wonder if it was something a nice Dutch boy from Marion County, Iowa, ever thought about much at all, that his life was given for people who really were much different than he was.

I doubt it.

When I stopped back then and paid my respects to John Van Ooyen and 8000 other American boys, as we call them, I couldn’t help but thank him and them for what all of them gave up for me and my kids and my grandkids and some Jewish guy named Rudolph Nadel, a New Yorker, who died just two months later than Van Ooyen and who's remembered just a couple of yards down the row of alabaster crosses.

Maybe they knew each other.

Maybe not.

It doesn't matter, really. Jew and Gentile, New Yorker and Iowan, they both gave us what we have. They died for a ton of reasons.

And, strangely enough, I'm one of them.

So are you.

This morning of Memorial Day week, I'm thankful for my Uncle Edgar and John Van Ooyen and Rudolph Nadel, and countless others.

Amid all the celebrations, the fireworks, and John Phillip Sousa marches, it’s good for all of us to remember that so many have suffered, so many have died.

And it’s very good to remember what Job could say in his suffering. “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Finally, of course, that’s the only good news on life and death. But there’s more on this day of remembrance. Here’s what Job said, “And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I will see God.”

Even if my uncle Edgar’s scrapbook is finally destroyed, that doughboy will be made flesh once again. And not alone. Me and Edgar. Me and you.

Because there will come a day when every last knee on earth—torn cartilages, busted knee caps, —even those fallen into dust beneath the ground, beneath the waves, beneath the radar screen of all of our attention—there will come a day when every last knee shall bow before God’s rule. Everyone.

 Think of it—men and women in cemeteries like this one emerging like hearty daffodils to shake off the slumber.

So, this holiday's week, let me add this image to the Mosaic. Think of a God who can, with a wink and a nod, turn this cemetery—and all of them--into Grand Central Station.

That’s the big story, really—bigger than a Washington crossing the Delaware River, the slaughter at Gettysburg, the raid on Pearl Harbor, the withdrawal to the Imjim River Line, the Tet Offensive, Operation Desert Storm, or the messes right now in Iran.

The big story this Memorial Day is the return of millions and millions of Edgars—and those who loved him, those who loved all of them from the beginning of time.

That’s the book on Edgar Hartman, an old story that, like the other worthwhile old stories, needs to be told over and over again until each of us recognizes it as our own.

That’s my addition—and his, this Great Uncle Edgar—to the mosaic.

Memorial Day iii

(cont. from yesterday)

What exactly happened to this man, shown here with two little children, one of them my uncle, the other a cousin, Uncle Edgar standing across the street from Wykhuis Store, which is now the Pizza Ranch in Oostburg, Wisconsin?

 

Well, his story is here too, at least what one man claims is Edgar Hartman’s story. My grandmother’s documents include a two-page, hand-written note from a man named Leo B. Zastrow, who described doughboy Edgar.

    He was a member of my platoon but was in another squad about         300 yds to the left of my squad of which I had command in a                 sunken road leading to Ville-Savoy they were dug in the banks of         the road. We had just finished a barrage of 15000 rounds for a             covering of our infantry’s advance across the Vesle River. They             were fired upon by German one-pounders immediately after our         barrage and according the Corporal’s information to me he was             instantly killed.. . .I later seen the body when relief came to my             Division on my way from the front and recognized the body only         by identification tags.”

As to any last words or message, Zastrow says he has none, but he wishes to assure Mr. Hartman’s folks that “he was my most trustworthy man.. . .I can assure them that he died a ‘Hero’ (capital H). And then, strikingly, “Hoping this information will be of value to you.”

My scrapbook also includes an impressive obituary from the Sheboygan Press, June 18, presumably 1920, which tells much of the story I’ve already related, and adds this: “In the village he was regarded as one of the most prominent young men. He was of a quiet disposition and was well liked by his friends.”

 On the final page of this scrapbook is the solitary picture of a solitary cross in a sprawling military cemetery, somewhere in France, I suppose. In very light letters on the cross piece, the words “Edgar Hartman,” and the number “178.”

Edgar Hartman was one of 126,000 American doughboys who didn’t return from the French killing fields or oceanic cemeteries. He was 28 years old when he died, single, and had been employed at the local lumber yard when duty called. He left behind a girlfriend, who later married and had her own life.

It’s entirely possible that no one at Hartman-Lammers American Legion Post knows much about Edgar Hartman, so think of this: if next June some prairie monster tornado would lift Sioux Center, Iowa, off the gently rolling plains of the American midwest, scattering the household goods of the James Schaap family hither and yon, and this scrapbook of all there is to know about Edgar Hartman were to disappear from the face of the earth, then no one could ever know much at all about the man. His story would be gone, his life as indistinguishable as his body the day that one-pounder killed him in a French ditch.

To hold this scrapbook in my hands has always been a profoundly humbling experience, not only because what’s here is all there is left of this man Edgar Hartman, but also because one can’t help realize how many others–my ancestors and yours, hundreds of millions of earthlings–have vanished from this world without leaving even a trace of themselves. My Edgar Hartman scrapbook, placed on a shelf above my desk, has become my own memento mori, an memento of death’s reality; because what’s truly humbling about having everything anyone on earth knows about Edgar Hartman between two covers of a Wal-Mart scrapbook is the nearly inescapable perception that someday each one of us will also be less than a memory.

But there’s really no big news here, is there? “Dust to dust, the mortal dies,” we used to sing, “both the foolish and the wise.” Later the old song says, “Yet within their hearts they say, that their houses are for aye; that their dwelling places grand shall for generations stand.”

I need Edgar Hartman. We all do. “No young man believes he shall ever die,” wrote William Hazlitt, long ago, and I don’t think he was discriminating.

But today, Memorial Day, 2026, it’s good for me to think of the anguish in these letters, many months after the Armistice was signed at five a.m., in a railway carriage in France, November 11, 1918. It’s good for me to think of what my grandma went through, not knowing. It’s good for me to think of that anguish repeated 125,000 times in one year here in this country during and after World War I; 8,500,000 times, worldwide by the end of that war. It’s good for me to remember the cost of freedom, just in that almost forgotten war itself.

Memorial Day ii

(cont. from yesterday) 

Had I known Uncle Edgar, I suppose I would feel slightly different than I do. Had I known him, grief would certainly play a role in way I feel when I sit here, paging through the photographs. Honestly, I don’t feel the grief my grandma certainly must have when he didn’t come back from France. For years, my mother says, our family’s attendance at the Oostburg Memorial Day cemetery “doings,” as Grandma herself used to call them, was mandatory. After all, her only brother had died in “the war to end all wars.”

In fact, my grandmother’s anguish is vividly here in my Uncle Edgar scrapbook. You can feel it. You can see it in an old envelope that never got through to her brother, and the letter it holds, dated March 14, 1919 (four months after Armistice Day, November 7, 1918), and written on her husband’s stationary–“Harry H. Dirkse, Village Clerk,” it says; that note, written in a much livelier hand than the scratchings on the back of the photos, is signed “Your sister, Mabel.” That’s my grandma.

Here’s what it says: “Dearest Brother, Am making another attempt to have you hear from us. I have now had eleven of my letters returned to me but none the last month so will send another in search of you. We have been unable to find any trace of you up to now, nor received anything from you since your field service card reached us on August 7th. We are all well and have a fine baby girl 3 mos. old awaiting your return. Will write more when I learn whether or not this reaches you. With Love.”

The “fine baby girl” is my mother.

The field service card she refers to is here too, in my hands. “Y * M * C * A,” it says at the top, with the words “With American Expeditionary Force” beneath it. The message is terse: “Dear Sister M, Just arrived safely in England will write again as soon as I have an address. Edgar.” It is not difficult for me to imagine how closely my grandmother must have guarded that postcard over the ensuing months.

And there’s more. My Uncle Edgar scrapbook has a childhood picture of the two of them, brother and sister. 

There’s even a baby picture, as well what seems to be an eighth grade graduation picture taken about 1905 or so—that’s him, back row, second from the tallest.

 There are five pictures of him in his military uniform. In one, he’s saluting; in another, a fat cigar juts from the corner of his mouth, while he stands beside his brother-in-law, my grandfather, behind him Oostburg’s Main Street as it must have looked in the early years of the century, a horse rail clearly recognizable out front of my grandfather’s blacksmith shop in the very middle of town.

The scrapbook also includes other things—a stamp-less post card from Basic Training in North Carolina, which mentions having to hike fifteen miles, a number of letters, the only historical record of what was on his mind in those last years of his life–amazement at the unending length of army chow lines, news of the mumps that kept him from sailing overseas with his company in April of 1918, joy on having run into another Oostburg boy–“good to see someone from home,” he writes.

And I have here in my scrapbook the official letter from the War Department, The Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, deeply-stained and dated August 23, 1919, more than a year after his death, and almost a year after the war’s end. It’s addressed to Mrs. Harry Dirkse, Oostburg, Wisconsin, and concerns a man the army noted as “201 (Hartman, Edgar J.) CD.”

“Madam,” it begins, and then, “It is with profound regret that I confirm. . .” You can guess the news.

On the next page is another document, equally official. “Army of the United States of America,” it says in a headline that tents over the top of the page and includes the official symbol of American government, an eagle with palm leaves in one grand claw, arrows in the other. “This is to certify that Edgar J. Hartman, Private, Machine Gun Company, 58th Infantry died with honor in the service of his country on the sixth day of August, 1918.”

The date for the certificate is itself profoundly sad. “Given at Washington D. C., office of The Adjutant General of the Army, this eleventh day of June, one thousand nine hundred and twenty.”

Memorial Day i

 

I was never formally introduced to my great uncle Edgar Hartman. He was dead long before I was born, even before my mother was born, in fact. But I knew of him by way of his only sibling, my grandmother, who used to tell me the same story, over and over, whenever I, as a boy, mowed her lawn.

A single ice-cube floated around at the top of a glass of lemonade she’d always bring out when I’d finish the grass on the north side of her house. She’d set that lemonade out, wave me to the porch beside her, then push that glass at me with a warning.

“You drink that slowly now,” she’d say. “Years ago, I brought my brother Edgar a quart jar of lemonade when he was working in the canning factory–one of those hot summer nights.” Her head would rise slightly, her eyes lose focus as she’d bring back the incident. “Edgar drank it in one gulp–never even brought it down,” she’d say, not without some admiration. “When he was finished he took one look at that empty jar and passed out–right then and there, flat on the floor.” She’d point at the lemonade. “Not so fast now.”

That was just about all I knew of this great uncle Edgar. I knew he was dead, of course, and that the local American Legion Post was named after him–Hartman-Lammers Post–and that he’d died in the Great War, World War I.

I was a kid then–maybe ten–and a half a century had passed since Uncle Edgar took leave from this vale of tears. He died somewhere in France, maybe in a scene like this—I don’t know—but for years the only story I knew about him featured a bout of heavy lemonade chugging and a quick trip to the cement floor at Oostburg Canning Factory, circa 1910.

Years later, my grandma passed along fistfuls of old scrapbook stuff to me, thinking, I suppose, that of her grandchildren, I seemed most fascinated by her stories of the past. Those old pictures and documents continued to yellow in a box I’d come heir to, each dutifully described in her chicken-scratch writing so I’d remember who was who and what was what.

When Grandma died, I dug into that bundle and found a bunch of things having to do with her brother Edgar. Odd. I was 500 miles from the Oostburg Canning Company and American Legion hall, but here I was, fated to be the sole caretaker of a life most everyone else had forgotten.

Edgar Hartman was not married when he was killed instantly by what his commanding officer called a German “one-pounder.” He was just one of millions killed in the endless horror of trench warfare that came to define the military madness of World War I. My mother never knew him; she’d been born a month and a half after his death. As far as I knew, no one alive knew my uncle Edgar.

 I suppose that’s why I put all those Uncle Edgar documents, photographs, and letters my grandmother had given me into a scrapbook with “Photo Album” embossed in gold across a non-descript, tan cover. There’s no picture of him sprawled out on the floor of the Oostburg Canning Company here, but there is, quite frankly, everything else anyone on earth knows of him. I’ve got all of that here in this scrapbook, so when I hold it, as I am now, I have in my hands every last shred of the life of a real human being, a man who happened to be my great uncle. You might say, I’ve got the book on Uncle Edgar.

"Above the Clouds"

For a time at least, the fog on the mountain was so thick that literally no one knew what was going on. A goodly chunk of the Battle of Chattanooga was fought in fog so burdensome that blue and gray soldiers had to look each other in the eye before they knew whether to shoot or embrace the indistinct figures in the chilled overcast. 

Basically, the intent of the Union and  Confederate armies were simple: for the Union, break through the obvious battle lines the Rebs had set up; for the Rebs, hold those lines down. But one of the enemies of both sides was the terrain of the fighting, terrain that prompted the Battle of Chattanooga to be dubbed "the battle above the clouds."

In 2010, Covenant College, right there on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, asked to visit for a semester, to teach a writing course as a visiting professor. It was a joy to be up there on the mountain, neighboring such a historical setting. If I'd been a quicker learner, I'd have come away with a better understanding of what happened in the "batte above the clouds," but I take some comfort from knowing that books--lots of them!--have been written about what happened here in late November of 1863, military action that opened the South to General Sherman's march and, eventually, the Union successes.

Like all battlefield memorials, what's here at Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain, was well as Missionary Ridge conveys inevitable seriousness. You're surrounded by so many monuments to sacrifice that it's difficult not to evaluate your self and your motivations. There's no escaping seriousness up on the mountain, where the battle above the clouds once happened,

This week, the Supreme Court paved the way for Southern states to reverse legislation that provided for minorities to have representation in national politics because racial preference, so said the conservative majority, is just another form of racial prejudice.

Almost immediately, several of those Southern states did what they could to rewrite legislation to shut down what we've come to call "affirmative action," thereby almost certainly limiting minority representation in the Congress. 

It seems the battle above the clouds, 160 years later, isn't yet concluded.