Ashes at Lent

As far as I know there was no sign that begged passers-by to take a handful along and bring it home.  He says himself that he did what he did so that when he returned home he could tell the story. Maybe we should consider those ashes something of a souvenir of his visit to Buchenwald, a concentration camp as bad or worse than any of the others with memorably horrifying names. Just a week or so later, he'd visit Dachau. More horrible? How does anyone compare horrors anyway?

Buchenwald was his first visit once the war was over and cleanup had begun. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could be unaffected by what the troops found.  

In the center of the camp was the crematorium, surrounded by a high stone wall. Unwanted prisoners, the sick and the maimed, were brought to this building at night and as soon as they stepped inside the wall they slid down a chute into the basement and were killed instantly. An elevator took the dead bodies to the main floor, where they were cremated. I counted five ovens in the crematorium. Human ashes were dumped on a pile outside of the camp.

This is the way he wanted to remember in his diary. Now, here's the act: "I took a handful of human ashes out of one of the ovens and sent it home to tell the story."

Home, eventually, was here. It's an odd to think about, but I can't help but wonder whatever happened to that little pile of ashes he grabbed from the pile. He sent it home, he says. Did he include, in his letter to his wife, an explanation of what it was, or did he wait to get home to try to explain? Even eye-witnesses couldn't believe what they saw, what they'd seen, dead bodies like cord wood, fifty boxcars stacked with shrunken bodies ready to be shipped somewhere even more hideous. Where? How might he have 

The chaplain's own remains have been in residence at a local cemetery for years and years, as have those of his wife. When he died, did his children find that jar or sack or whatever he kept those ashes in? Did they know? Did he tell his children the story? How? When? Maybe some years later, he simply dispensed with them himself when he started to feel as if the story lost currency--or when he realized he no longer could muster the strength it took to tell the story? When he himself passed away, did his wife hold on to the ashes or drop them in his office wastebasket?

It's Lent. A week or so ago, many of us wore ashes across our foreheads as if to recite aloud the OT passage about "dust to dust." I couldn't help thinking about that vial of human ashes the chaplain sent on home to tell the story, in part because we use ash and not dust to adorn our foreheads. Ash, I'm told, is more adhesive. 

It's not the same really--I mean using Buchenwald ash, or ash from any other human source. It's not easy to find hope in a cupful of human ashes taken from a pile outside a crematorium. If that kind of human ash were the stuff of the forehead cross, it would bespeak the sins of others more so than my sin, than my mortality, than the brevity of my life. Wouldn't be Lent exactly, or would it?

For me at least, it's difficult not to wonder just where the ashes he sent home could be today. 

Then again, the best guess is that they've simply disappeared into the dust from which they'd come.

"Whose Glory Fills the Sky"

But as I was saying, yesterday it was the second verse of "Christ  Whose Glory Fills the Sky" that stopped me. 

Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by Thee;
joyless is the day's return,
till Thy mercy's beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

 Again, the good Rev. Wesley's intent is not a chore. What he's saying is that morning's opening moments--the hour or so before dawn--is "dark and cheerless" if it opens on its own, outside of the redeeming love of Christ. Only if "Thy mercy's beams" are present can my eyes be made glad and my heart be warmed. Beauty is in the Son, not the sun.

For a moment--correct me if I'm wrong--a dawn, even a knock-out gorgeous dawn, isn't a metaphor or a symbol. It's not much of anything if I don't have Jesus. 

I don't care to quarrel with Charles Wesley, with his theology or his poetic talent. But when we sang that second verse, I was struck by how perfectly understandable the spirituality of the hymn was, there, on display: this world's darkness is cheerless without Jesus. I get that. I understand.

But let me try to put it this way: a dawn is gorgeous only if I know the Lord. 

Traditional Native religion would have some trouble understanding the dualism there, the strange sense that white folks require a God who stands somewhere outside the dawn to make the dawn the dawn. Traditionally, they might want to say that God is dawn. He's also rocks and trees and skies and seas. God is the great mystery of life itself, the Great Spirit who lives and breathes in all things, including those shaggy bison. We honor that God when we honor the Missouri River and don't ruin it with pipelines because that river isn't a symbol or a metaphor. 

But then, I think everyone could agree with Wesley's spirited final verse:

Visit then this soul of mine,
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine,
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more Thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.

 One of the peculiar results of 19th century mission work among First Nations was its somehow surprising successes. But, if you were Native and if you believed that all of life is religion, then picking up another form of religion wouldn't be particularly troublesome, would it? Sure, we'll become Christian, some said. What's the fuss?

 

For a time, this morning, as I wrote these words, the sky outside my window a gorgeous peach stole lay along the shoulders of the eastern horizon, a soft orange that faded into yellow, then to blue up high before the sun made its grand debuted. Now, long swaths of sunlight stretch over the fields east to west, scattering darkness. It's Midas time--everything wears a bit of gold. This morning's cloudless dawn is not glamorous, but it's beautiful.

"Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" a wonderful hymn, and I'll sing it joyfully again soon, I hope. Wesley's a wonder, isn't he? 

But he's not the psalmist:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech,

and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

There is no speech nor language,

where their voice is not heard.

Wesley's good, but I'd like to believe that David got it right.

Whose glory fills -- i

 

Charles Wesley wrote something like 9000 poems in his life--can you imagine? It's a wonder he slept. Nearly 6000 were hymns. Even today, his work is all over the hymnbook--yours, mine, and the folks down the street. His brother, John Wesley (two of the 18 Wesley kids), became more famous as an itinerant preacher who had a hand in begetting the entire movement called Methodism.

If Charles thought it difficult to live with his sibling's celebrity pulpiteering, his envy certainly doesn't show in his work. Give a listen: "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," and "Rejoice! the Lord Is King!"--all Charles, all his work, and there's hundreds more.

John Wesley is an important historical figure in the history of Protestantism, but brother Charles' creations are still sung hundreds of thousands of times every Sunday. Not bad for a kid brother.

We sang one yesterday, an old fave some consider as beautiful as anything Brother Charles ever wrote. "Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" is a paean to Jesus, the light of the world. Its stunning poetry is rich and thoughtful. You can sing "Christ, Whose Glory" without thinking about the path it takes through life; but if you listen to the praise his poem creates, it's easy to see why the old hymn won't soon be laid to rest. 

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true and only Light,
Sun of righteousness, arise,
triumph o'er the shade of night;
Day-spring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

The major motif is clear enough--Jesus, the son is Jesus the sun. Just as dawn--I'm sitting beside it right now--chases away darkness, so the Son sweeps hope and joy and life to a darkened world. What's real and what's symbol are sweetly entwined.

But in church yesterday it was the second verse that stopped me. 

(A little needle-picking theology tomorrow)

Great-grandpa

I'd become convinced before that night that whatever ills had befallen, I was vastly more capable of crying than I'd ever been, tears for no apparent reason. Check that--not "for no apparent reason," but for reasons that seemed unlike any ordinary reason for tears. Just did more of it. I didn't think I was depressed about being crippled, nor was my condition such that I absolutely couldn't determine what kind of future I--and we--would have. What I recognized about myself was that I just shed tears more easily than I had before the stenosis (and what the heck is "stenosis" anyway?). 

Maybe there was a cause/effect thing going on here, I thought--the stenosis somehow made me shed tears, froze something in my heart just as it had frozen something in my legs and in my balance and made me look soused when I walked, which I couldn't really do at all without a walker.

I cried a lot--not about my condition, not because I'd won a badge that hung from the rearview, not because just getting in an out of our Subaru was a dangerous challenge, an event I hadn't yet accomplished without sinking like a baby in a high-chair.

Not only that, the phone call I'd just taken didn't pass along news that was at all surprising. I knew our granddaughter was about to have her baby, our first great-grandchild, knew that baby was going to be a little girl, and knew the pregnancy had gone extremely well. I was no more surprised about her birth than I was concerned. Everything went great, my wife told me when she called.

"And what was the name again?" I asked. My wife wasn't altogether sure herself--"It was 'heaven' spelled backwards," she said, "and I don't know how to say it exactly." That would take a while. But that's the headline that night: "You're a great-grandpa!!!" 

So I cried. Wasn't scared a bit, wasn't worried. I was 76 years old, but I couldn't remember the last time I actually wiped tears away tears of joy, and that's what they were--tears of joy. 

And lo, it was good. It was very good. Dang right. I'd been at Heartland Manor for three days. I needed 'em maybe--tears of joy. 

Heartland was my third hospital in about a month--two stints just up the road, a week an hour away in the city, and now Heartland Manor, when the hospital staff determined that my condition would require more than the kind and level of care I could get closer to home. I'd just then become a resident of a home that was that for people--some younger, some older--who mostly had conditions I couldn't help thinking had gone farther south than mine.

Anyway, there I lay in my little hospital bed, wiping away tears of joy, when a nurse came in. Dissembling wasn't an option--my eyes were smeary and I was sniffing. 

"What's the deal, Jim?" she said and stood right over me, blessedly, as nurses do.

I told her, and just like that something in me squeezed another half-dozen out. Voice warbled, nose ran--I was a mess. Tears of joy.

Here's the story: she cried too, which only guaranteed that this blessed spell I was in was going to keep leaking waterworks.

Another nurse just happened by. "Tell her, Jim," nurse #1 said, both of us squeezing Kleenex. "Girl or boy?" she said. 

"Girl," I said.

"And what's her name?" she said, reaching for the box.

"I don't know," I said. I didn't. "H-e-a-v-e-n spelled backwards or something."

That's when Nurse #3 dropped by, having noted all the commotion. Just like that a quartet of blubbering sobbers started singing, all of it, all of that wet stuff sprung from sheer joy. 

This fourth bawler had heard the name before. She pulled a pen from her garb, grabbed some paper from somewhere, and spelled it out in big blocks: "N--E--V--A--E--H," she wrote because she didn't want Great-grandpa to be a fool should the new mom call. She hung the baby's name up above the tv.

I stayed at Heartland Manor for two and one-half months. Still can't believe it. And I told my wife when finally I could get in and out of the car without spilling all over the driveway, that it wasn't good for my marriage to be there that long because I fell in love at least a dozen times.

It's true. Let me tell you about the night my wife called to tell me about the baby--our great granddaughter, the first. 

Don't mind my sniveling.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“. . .but must be controlled by bit and bridle

or they will not come to you.”

 Just a few years ago, Bernie Ebbers, who is, according to Forbes, “perhaps the most powerful American businessman ever to face a criminal trial,” was found guilty and went to jail, his sentence yet to be determined.  His crimes?—securities fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents.

 On hearing the verdict, Ebbers hugged his wife and step-daughter, and then cried.  His lawyer continues to plead his innocence.

 Bernie Ebbers was a celebrity entrepreneur who turned a small, long-distance company in Mississippi into one of the largest communications providers in the world, WorldCom.  He was WorldCom’s CEO from 1985 to 2000, and, when his company’s stocks were flying, his personal worth reached close to a billion.  Today he’s dressed in a yellow uniform provided by the state. 

 The government’s case was that, faced with a more grim business future than he’d seen in years, Bernie Ebbers cooked the books. In decisions that involved millions of dollars, he flat-out lied. 

 I feel closer to Bernie Ebbers than I do to Kenneth Lay, the other CEO who was, several years ago, deeply discredited by gigantic financial fraud, who presided over the power giant Enron before its demise.  I feel closer to Ebbers because I know where he went to church when he was a boy. I know the songs he sang in Sunday School.  We learned our catechism out of the same books. We are both hyphenated-Dutch and were reared in the Reformed faith.

 What Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers share, in addition to the notoriety that has come from the demise of their businesses and their having been colored by accusations of deceit, is this alarming truth: they both taught Sunday school.

 The purgative power of tragedy, Aristotle said, was that we suffer, all of us, when basically good human beings fall on their faces, not because of what others do to them, but because of what they’ve done to themselves. We see ourselves in those people because tragic stories begin in good hearts. 

 A significant part of me hurts for Bernie Ebbers—not because I believe him to be falsely accused or convicted, not because I don’t regard his crimes as evil. I find myself in him, even though my sourest weaknesses don’t include greed.

The second half of verse 9 of Psalm 32 bites and bites hard.  God is speaking, as David hears him, and what he says is that too often his own people can be mulish.  Without a bridle, we go where we damn well please, even good, good people.  Too easily, maybe, we bray like that mule in Jeremiah, “sniffing the wind in her craving—in her heat who can restrain her?” As Spurgeon says, “We should not be treated like mules if there were not so much of the ass about us.”

Today, I hope—and I should pray—that Bernie Ebbers has been jerked back to a path he knows well, one that’s straight and narrow. 

But in its tragic dimension, what his story and his fate make clear is that I too—too often—require a steel bit through the teeth.

Wish it weren’t so.       

Prairie du Chien

The Winnebago are right down the road, the Omaha a stretch farther. The Santee across the river. The Dakota up river in South Dakota. But was it always that way?

 For the record, the very first white men to set foot on the place people know of today as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (flip Iowa, and you'll run into it) are a couple of names familiar to people over there on the Mississippi, Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, and his side kick Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary who rather liked the sightseeing and exploring that came with his travel package.

Again, for the record, the year the two of them came down the Wisconsin River to its confluence with the Mississippi was 1673, which makes Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a little river town that sits right there today, the second oldest white colony in the Badger state. “Well,” you ask, “who was number one among the Cheeseheads?” The Packers, of course, or at least Green Bay, just a couple of decades after the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and on Plymouth Rock.

Okay, you say, but what has that to do with us? Well, anyone who wants to know anything about the region's most awful 19th century horror, the Spirit Lake Massacre, which took place in 1857, way over here, hundreds of miles west of Jolliet and Marquette. And now you're wondering what the heck Inkpaduta, a Santee Wahpakutee, a Dakota Sioux and his warriors were doing at Lake Okoboji, a century before the roller coaster. How'd that murderer get here to the neighborhood anyway? He and his warriors just arise from the ground like poison sumac.

The answer has to do with that little Wisconsin town, Prairie du Chien. In 1825, almost 200 years after Jolliet and Marquette, a slew of Native people pitched their tents for talk with the white men in blue coats. “Who?” you ask. Easy: Sioux, Chippewa, Menominee, Winnebago, Sac & Fox, and Ioway, in other words, oodles of teepees.

And why right there? Because, like Sioux City, Prairie du Chien sits close to the confluence of two wonderful hi-ways: the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. 

And what was discussed? The future. Specifically, from a white man's point of view--how to stop the Injuns from killing each other? The answer won't surprise you: We'll keep them out of each other's hair. We'll give them each a homeland--not a reservation (that would come later), but give them each their own place to hunt buffalo and fish and trap beaver, or so the white men promised. 

So once upon a time in 1825, at a place that would someday be called Prairie du Chien, the whole upper Midwest--from eastern Wisconsin to western Iowa got segmented, not into states, but into regions where each tribe ran its own affairs.

Fair enough--right? Keep all those wild Indians racing horses, chasing buffalo, and out of each other’s hair. For the record, here's the segments drawn up by the gang at the signing of the 1825 Prairie du Chien Treaty: most of what is Minnesota goes to the Sioux (think Inkpaduta); most of Wisconsin to the Chippewa or (today) Ojibwe; most of Iowa to the Sac and Fox (think Black Hawk) and (wait for it) the Ioway.

The land where I'm sitting today, and the land where it's likely you are, was, at the time of the Spirit Lake Massacre, meant to be in possession of the Sac and Fox and Ioway, not the Sioux.

So then where were the Ioway when Inkpaduta and his band were way down south and west on the Little Sioux River?

 They were putting down roots in eastern Kansas or Oklahoma, on something people started to call “reservations,” where you'll still find some of them today.

My goodness, "reservations"? you ask. Who on earth came up with that idea? 

Need a little hint? Wasn't them. 

My first Ash Wednesday

Fifteen, maybe twenty years after I left the southwest corner of Wisconsin, I went back to look over the land, something I hadn't done while I lived and worked there. I'd been to Galena, IL, at night, only to scout some opposing basketball team; I had no idea that the old river city would become one of Illinois' finest tourist attractions.

I had no idea that the kids who sat in my classes could well have been great, great grandchildren of the original "badgers," thus named for their profession--the iron miners who dug out pits that still, here and there, litter the region. I sort of knew that those miners were a tough crew, a whole world apart from the Dutch Calvinists among and from whom I grew up. A number of those kids came from family-owned cheese factories that turned out the Swiss and brick I learned quickly to love, gifts for this young Turk teacher, still wet behind the ears, barely older than their kids. But I'd never taken the time to see where they'd come from. I was writing a novel. . .

Made me angry, being back there, driving past the high school, looking in the windows where I used to hold forth, disappointed with myself,  I hadn't really gone off-road during the two years I spent in Lafayette County, WI, whose claim to fame was having no stop lights. I hadn't gone up and down gentle hills authored by countless rivers in a hurry west to the Mississippi, Dubuque little more than a half hour away.

In those two years, even though I lived a half-hour from school, I'd never taken the time to see where my students came from. I mean, I knew that some kids were milkers and some cheesemakers, but I'd never seen the dairies where they'd spent their childhoods, storybook places in those rolling hardwood hills of America's Dairyland.

Truth be known, for me, at least, it was a hard sell to think of them as Christian believers. When your origins never wander all that far in a sturdy corral, defining characteristics are as bold as they are clear. It's not a surprise, I suppose, that on Ash Wednesday, when the Catholic kids came back from lunch with dirt rubbings on their foreheads, I had no idea what was going on and trouble not bringing the matter up. So many strangely dirtied.

"What's goin' on?" I must have asked someone or another, pointing up at my untouched forehead.

And it had to have been a treat to one or two of them to field that question, put the teacher in a desk and strong-arm the podium. "Can you imagine, Mr. Schaap has no idea it's Ash Wednesday." 

If I'd have unloaded on them, quoted from my catechism, done a Calvin thing, or simply rehearsed the reasons for the glorious Reformation, I'd have convinced them that I was nuts. I could have done that, but instead asked for their forbearance and that they not consider me as dingy as I must have seemed.

Some, as I remember, didn't wipe off the dust, so it stayed there all afternoon for me to see and judge--my Calvinism made me good at judging--and I remember thinking Bobby Westgaard?--the baddest kid in town has a dirty cross up there on his noggin? You got to be kidding. What kind of hocus-pocus religion would offer him the sacrament?'

In truth, I wasn't much older--four years--than they were, just as much a kid, maybe more. I was 22 years old, in love with my students, but innocent as Young Goodman Brown. 

Last night, that whole first Ash Wednesday and its scrapbook of memories came back as I watched my fellow congregants receive the imposition of ashes, as the action is traditionally called. 

I'm not bragging about this, but the imposition my students left on their foreheads fifty-some years ago, and my own naivete, my idiocy about it, left its own indelible mark, something I couldn't help but remember as people left the front of the church, the same dirty old cross on their foreheads. 

Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I went back to southwest Wisconsin in part because I wanted to see up close where they lived, where they came from. 

There was so much I had to learn. 

"Something there is. . ."

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Thus begins one of America's all-time favorite poems, "Mending Wall," by one of its all-time favorite poets, a New Englander named Robert Frost, who wanted to sell an image of himself as a country bumpkin, when he wasn't an "awe-shucks" sort of guy. He was cagey as a red squirrel, tricky and quick enough not only to take on something as formidable as a stone wall, but wily enough to start with a dorky pun.

"What, pray tell, "doesn't love a wall" but "sends the frozen-ground swell under it"?

Why "frost" of course, as in upper case "Frost." Not funny? Okay, but maybe the most beloved pun in American literature.

Neighbors get together annually to rebuild the stone fence that separates their yards, to replace the stones that have fallen throughout the last year. The teller of the tale, Frost, can't help but wonder whether the world wouldn't be a better place without fences, while his neighbor stoically repeats a maxim he likely inherited from his grandpa: "good fences make good neighbors." If we don't know where you start, and I end, we got trouble in River City --"good fences make good neighbors."

Stone fences are a rarity in our neighborhood. About 150 years ago, barbed wire became all the rage--no annual rock replacements had to be made after all, and once the barbed wire is up, that's it--aside from occasional repairs. A bundle of barbed wire isn't all that comely, but the lousy stuff did more than its share to win the west, even though it didn't show up until after the Civil War. 

Not until 1874 did an Ohioan named Joseph Glidden patent an invention which became the industry standard, twisted wire with locked in barbs. Barbed wire made it possible to section off the unending cattle range the Great Plains once were, a space so wide-open cowboys used to wonder whether the world had an end. Barbed wire kept cattle and the neighbors both in--and out. 

A barbed-wire fence gave the property dimensions and kept the sheep out of the tomatoes and raspberries. During World War I, barbed wire demarked those bloody trenches in France. Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belzen, Dachau--they were all drawn and quartered by barbed wire. 

Today, it's coming down. Confinements and feedlots have replaced pastures. Sioux County, where I live, is the #1 hog producing county in the U. S., but you could take an all-day ride around here and not spot a pig even though there are as many as two million.

Robert Frost was right about there being some ambiguity. This morning, as I sit here over the keyboard, the wind is howling. The sun is shining, so there's no blizzard a'comin'--not right away at least; but I just finished reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard, a painful recitation of the stories of the children caught in crisis in a monster blizzard, right here, throughout our very region in January of 1888. Hundreds of children were out in that blinding blizzard. Many never returned home.

But some of those that did, like their parents who went after them, stayed upright and kept chugging through impossible winds and snow because as they crossed their fields to find their kids, they kept hold of wire, of barbed wire, confident that if they held fast to the prickly stuff they'd often enough strung themselves, they'd eventually stumble their way to something that offered safety. Gives new meaning to "Good fences make good neighbors."

Dang Frost doesn't tell you what he thinks. He follows these two gents as they repair their stone walls, while arguing--not strenuously or angrily--about limits, about traditions, about the privacy of private property. 

Something there is that doesn't love barbed wire--it's ornery and prickly and twisted, but once upon a time, in a storm, it was a blessing.

 

Today--on my birthday

That's my father. He's holding me. I'm not a reliable judge of such things, but I was likely six months old or so, maybe less. I discovered this picture a week ago or so, while sorting through the flotsam and jetsam the flood left behind, the flood that sent us fleeing from our country place and into the senior housing fortress where we now live. 

I don't recognize the background, so I'm guessing it's somewhere close to where we lived in the spring of 1948. My two sisters were already creating havoc in the neighborhood when I came onto the scene, exactly--today--78 years ago. 

His tie is a little bold, don't you think? --almost Native looking. I don't think Dad ever walked into a room and overwhelmed the place, not that he would have wanted to. He was mild-mannered and thoughtful, by nature not judgmental, just about as good a father as I could have wished. At his funeral, a dozen people--maybe more--told me my dad was a saint. They weren't kidding. 

He's been gone for a decade or so, passed without great drama, in a quiet, saintly fashion. As a believer, he was top-notch without being showy--that tie isn't like him. I think it's fair to say that he honestly tried to be the best human being he could because he believed with all his heart that's what Christ wanted of him and all of us. 

We split loyalties when it came to politics. Where his ardent Republicanism came from, I'll never know. He was inescapably conservative but never mean, never Trumpian. I was in high school when I met a housewife from Madison, WI, whose husband, she told us, was in Selma, marching for racial justice with Martin Luther King. It was 1965. That revelation just floored me because she was so ordinary, probably in her fifties, no commie radical. For me, that iced it--MLK wasn't the leftist enemy Dad thought he was. There was more to the story.

Dad lived in a world where one's lot in life was determined by personal responsibility. Those who sweat through it, succeeded; those who didn't, did not.  I don't know that Dad ever had a sense of what "Jim Crow" meant, or the legacies of slavery. He probably knew more about Calvinist theology than he did about American history.

It's sometimes hard to admit that I have become him far more than I once might have guessed. Even when I thought his shadow wasn't around, it was--and still is. I'd love a trike right now--something I could ride through the trails all around our new place. On Saturday, I went out to a bike shop with such specialties, got myself an intro to biking for people with my infirmities. When we talked price, I balked--after all, what would my dad think of his son putting that kind of money into a fancy trike with an electric motor? He wouldn't have said no--he wasn't judgmental; but his hesitancy had its own language. He still has a hand in every major decision I make. 

A couple years after his death, I was suddenly struck with the perception that he might never have quite understood his son's fiction, novels and short stories. Neither of my parents were readers; neither had any penchant for imaginative literature. Dad might have found it difficult, if not impossible to realize that when his son created a father in a story or novel, that father wasn't necessarily modeled after his own. I know he disliked Home Free, my first novel, because he believed people who read it and knew him somehow mistakenly figured the opinionated, crusty old Dutch immigrant father was somehow him. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, I've been working on a collection of my stories, published through the years, a collection with plenty of explanations and sources, a collection that speaks to them, explains where ideas come from and how those ideas become transformed into the "felt life" of fiction. 

About heavenly libraries I know absolutely nothing, and they--Mom and Dad--are both long gone. How can I write it for them?

Like I say, Dad may have departed this life some time ago, but that doesn't mean he's left the scene. Nor Mom. There's a lot of her and a lot of him I hear when their voices sound within me. 

This morning--the 17th of February 2026, is exactly 78 years since I left Sheboygan Memorial Hospital adorned with this.

Long ago, birthdays stopped being "fun," but my getting another year and salvaging that old picture up top reminds me that today, as always, I have much to be thankful for.

For Presidents' Day

 

[An old Small Wonders piece celebrating President U. S. Grant. You can listen to the five-minute podcast here or read it below.} 

You'll find it just over the Mississippi, next door to Dubuque. The rolling hills all around hide the place, so when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels like a discovery. It’s a 19th century gem where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, Illinois, the whole of it, is a museum.

Nine Civil War generals once called the place home--not bad for a stop on the river. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, is a name you’ll recognize. His presidency is probably less memorable than his command of the Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant fought Robert E. Lee and took sword at Appomattox, and promptly, boldly, and respectfully gave it back. As a warrior, he was a generous man.

As a commander he was indefatigable, as a strategist determined, relentless and disciplined. But when the smoke cleared, he championed charity and grace that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He faced the horrors of war head on just as he faced peace once the war’s canons went silent. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, President Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if he’d sit down and record his memories. That was a dumb idea, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. When a few of Grant’s published essays brought rewards, Twain made offers he couldn't refuse. U. S. Pres number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his considerable legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

In his massively detailed biography of U. S. Grant, American Ulysses, Ron Chernow refutes the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish that memoir, even though he was dying. 

Seems to me you need only to read a letter Grant wrote to the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he fell hard into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, a close friends. 

Our nation grieves for one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just gorgeous style, that’s heart spilling hurt over the page.

Frederick Douglas, the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of our 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was a hard-nosed general who never escaped the shadows of a bottle, a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, just drop by Galena, Illinois, sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit Grant’s home, spend an hour at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

As do we.

---

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

Do not be like the horse or the mule,

    which have no understanding

but must be controlled by bit and bridle

    or they will not come to you.

The University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Lawrence, Kansas, is, at least temporarily, the final hitching post for Comanche, a horse who, for decades, may have been America’s most revered and certainly was most recognized steed, despite being dead. 

What fresh troops discovered once the dust settled at the scene of the famous 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn was 200 of Custer’s men dead, and one horse, Comanche, still alive, a fourteen-year-old buckskin gelding injured and therefore not hustled off after the battle as so many others were by the conquering tribes.

 I’m not sure anyone ever thought of disposing of the injured animal—perhaps not.  Whether or not he could ever run again, Comanche was simply too stark a symbol.  So he was taken to Fort Riley, where he died, and was lovingly stuffed by the best taxidermist in Kansas, an employee of the museum where Comanche still (after a fashion) stands.

Thousands filed past him (his upright remains anyway) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Rumor had it that Comanche was General George Armstrong Custer’s own mount (not true).  Custer’s favorite horse, Vic, either died on the hill where Custer himself did, or else was snatched up by the conquering foe.  Among Native Americans, legend has it that a Santee Sioux named Grey Earth Track ended up with Vic, a thoroughbred, after the battle. 

Should you care to visit Comanche, you’ll find him enclosed in glass and wearing his cavalry blanket and saddle.  In the century+ which has passed since the Columbian Exposition, visitors have dwindled to a trickle, I suppose.  So it goes with legends.  The case once had a brass plaque proclaiming “Sole survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn.”  In the Sixties it was, quite thoughtfully, removed at the request of Native Americans. 

That Comanche is still standing is understandable, given his legendary status—the last mount from an epic battle, the only thing left breathing at Little Big Horn.  He remains, I’d say, a symbol of the rough-hewn history of the American West, and he is what he was—a horse.  For more than a century, no animal was as significant to life on the Great Plains as the horse—to the Sioux, to the cavalry, to the settlers. 

King David had no idea that the horse would be as important to American culture as it was, historically.  Warring tribes he knew, but he had no notion of Sitting Bull or South Dakota.  Maybe we shouldn’t indict him for so unequally yoking the horse and mule in verse nine.  To old-timers who remember farming pre-John Deere, horses still hold special favor, after all.

I’m missing the point, of course.  Verse nine isn’t about horses; it’s about us, and animals, and what separates us—human understanding.  We’ve got it, and they don’t, despite our nostalgia, our tributes, and two or three centuries of Great Plains history. 

What makes us human—among other things—is understanding, the ability to think through our own actions.  What’s at stake is wisdom, not horse sense.  We’ve got to use it, but what the verse suggests is that too often we don’t. 

Custer didn’t.  But he’s not the only one.  All too often, neither do we.

That’s the point, I guess.

February Cold

In all the years I've spent traipsing around the neighborhood, I've occasionally got out of bed with the expressed purpose of trying to get pictures that will recreate sheer cold. They're useless, of course. Who would want to use a winter picture that makes people shiver? Put something like this up in your family room and guests will reach up to button their sweaters.

How about this one?--the sun coming up over the Big Sioux. Somewhere out there, not quite visible, sits Hawarden, shivering. There's something in the lay of the fog maybe that makes the point. It's very cold outside, and I've got my hunting gloves on, the ones with individual fingers.

By my estimation, this is the best short from the morning of February 15, 2010, although I don't think it sends chills--could have been taken almost any time of year.

It's always nice to have company, especially on forgettable, cold February mornings; but getting this crows well requires a wildlife photographer who's a quicker draw than I am. 

I don't believe that I was, this morning, thinking about trapping February cold in my camera. But it's hard to warm up to the record I came home with.

I don't need to say, it's here. You can like a picture like this one, but who on earth would like to have it up for months at a time. 

 

Today, 16 years later, the temperature will push all the way up into the low 50s. This kind of cold looks almost beautiful from a distance. 

From a distance. 

Nurse Eliza Müller, Hero

By today's standards, she wasn't a nurse. She lacked the formal training young men and women take these days before they get to the hospital floor. We have to be able to trust them because we are what they do. Even though Eliza Muller--be sure to get that umlaut above the u--never underwent the requisite training a nursing degree requires today, have no doubt about the testimonies her patients gave once the war was over: Eliza Müller--with an umlaut--was a nurse. "You betcha'" as they say in Minnesota. She was a nurse for the ages--and a hero in a fleeting, bloody moment of time at which  there were very, very few.

Truth be told, we know very little about her childhood, her family, even where she was born and reared. We can trust that her parents' circle of friends were well-established in the 1830s, when she was born. Her community--far out east--was German-American; but unlike those who were moving into central Minnesota in the mid-19th century, her family, like that of her husband, Dr. Alfred Müller who was, officially, the appointed surgeon at Minnesota's Ft. Ridgely. 

If you've never heard of Ft. Ridgely, you're not alone. It's greatly overshadowed by its much bigger and more ballyhooed big brother, Fort Snelling, which stands amid Minnesota's Twin Cities right there on the Mississippi River. What remains is not much more than a skeleton at Ft. Ridgely, which is not a reason not to visit.

So Dr. Müller and his capable wife, our hero, fell into treachery in the summer of 1862, when hundreds of marauding Dakota warriors determined their lives would be worth living if and when they killed everyone in the neighborhood--man, woman, and child. So they tried.

And they did bloody well. Most authoritative sources forward a death toll of 350 or so dead settlers, even though historically the toll has ranged to as many as twice that number, all in a matter of less than a month. 

You're saying  you never heard of such a thing, and it wasn't that far away? You're not alone. This nation is 250 years old this year. They'll be no end of fireworks, but don't expect to hear much at all about the 1862 Dakota War. It ain't pretty and it really doesn't have heroes. 

Save Eliza Müller--with an umlaut. Tell you what, let's just call her Nurse Eliza Müller because she tended the wounded graciously, assisted her husband's surgeries, and with him did the triage so necessary when little skeletal Ft. Ridgely suffered not just one but two separate assaults from the angry Dakota warriors that vastly outnumbered those trying to stay alive behind the fort's stone walls.

This Ft. Ridgely wasn't constructed to hold off a military siege--there were no walls, no palisades, no watchtowers for sharpshooting guards. It was--still is--wide open. Everything's exposed. When bullets and arrows flew, there was no shelter, so when people say that Eliza Müller showed divine grace under fire, they weren't making things up. 

Only an idiot would say that the 1862 Dakota War had no heroes. There were dozens, I'm sure. But the darkness that swept over the Minnesota River Valley for several months in 1862 leaves just about all the selflessness deep in shadow. 

And that, or so it seems to me, is reason enough to remember Eliza Müller, with an umlaut. When you finish at the Fort, go east for a block or so to the oldest section of the cemetery. Won't be long and you'll find a memorial, from the state, to Nurse Müller's memory. Take off your hat. Maybe leave a flower. 

She's a nurse. She's a hero.

**“In memory of

Mrs. Eliza Müller,

wife of Assistant Surgeon A. Müller, U.S.A.

Her valor and her devotion to the care of the sick and wounded soldiers and refugees during and after the Sioux Indian outbreak of 1862

will forever be cherished

in the hearts of a grateful people.”**