Country Schools*

Poor things haven't seen a kid in years. They don't look as depressed as they are simply desolated, where they still exist at all. Sure, some people live in them these days, having turned them into homes; but most are long gone--the old one-room schools. Here one stands out in the country, empty of kids, empty of soul. 

I feel a little guilty snapping a picture, having caught the old place so out of sorts. It's like coming up on a dead body along the road. There's a face here somehow, or am I dreaming? It seems an act of mercy to take the color out. I don't know why, but black and white bestows at least some vagrant dignity. 

Once they were ubiquitous, hard as that it to believe. Here's the Carmel, Iowa, area, circa 1908. Ye olde Atlas claims six of these schools existed in what amounts to six square miles. Look for yourself.

Once they were greatly welcoming, I'm sure. Farms were much smaller; families were much bigger. Many more kids meant more rural schools. All six of these are long gone now, but then so are most of the kids.

My mother taught in one of these places long, long ago, mid-thirties or so, when she was a young thing just out of normal school, too young at times to handle big farm boys who walked through doors like this only occasionally, when they weren't cultivating or helping out with spring planting. I remember Mom telling me that some of the boys she had in Lakeview country school were almost her age and somewhat fearfully bigger than she was. She remembered letting one of them drive her car, some fellow named LeRoy Fritsch, long dead, I imagine. She used to shake her head in disbelief when she remembered letting him do that. I'm sure she was taken with him somehow. I've been a teacher myself.

And once upon a time, in a school just like Hoff District 80 my mother said she was having a good day, mid-winter, when in the middle of a lesson to one grade or another, something started rolling up the hardwood floor from the back, making the kind of hollow noise that edged itself into distraction. She didn't remember what she was teaching, but she remembered hearing the empty noise then seeing a marble, one of those big ones--didn't people used to call them "shooters"?--big as a chestnut.

Like I was saying, a place like this, just such a place.

She was busy with some of the others--a school like this included all eight grades--and I know she was deeply invested in whatever it was she was doing. People say she was a great teacher, and I believe it. Anyway, there she was, mid-winter, in the middle of school a half mile from Lake Michigan with a bunch of tough farm kids when a big marble came rolling up on the wooden floor. I've always thought it was LeRoy Fritsch who did it.

Without thinking, book in hand, she reached down and picked it up. It was, she said, so shockingly red hot that it seared her fingers because it had been heated on the potbelly stove. My mother rarely used bad language, but that moment could well have been one of those times when refraining was out of the question. 

Whatever she said or did at that moment, the pain and shock and disrespect never really left. Nor did it leave her son, who heard the story when he was just a little boy who loved his mom. 

I think I hated LeRoy Fritsch for most of my life, even though I never met him. Old childhood hate that keeps the name alive after all these years and both of their deaths.

You can't help thinking about it when you stand out there beside what few of these still exist--that once upon a time a place like this was full of stories, full of life.

_________________

*  Rpt from March 6, 2015, when there were, I'm sure, more than a few of these abandoned schoolhouses in the country and neighborhood.

How am I doing? Still learning. . .

That's me way over there sitting on a chair against the far wall. You're looking at the Dutch American History Museum (DAHM) in Orange City, a great place that houses a wonderful collection of Native American artifacts. For about ten years I served on the board of the museum and did numerous tours through the museum--and its Indigenous section. Health reasons prompted me to back away, and I did at about the same time the DAHM took in sufficient funding to hire a part-time administrator. 

A week ago or so, she asked me to come to museum and do a tour of the Native side of the DAHM. A goodly number of people from Landsmeer would be coming in, and she wanted me to be the docent. I told her I would--I'd be in Orange City anyway for an appointment at the hospital. I could stop by at just about the time I'd be going home. 

When people ask me how I'm doing these days, I tell them it's a difficult question to answer. If I just say good and they watch me take a step or two, with cane or walker, the image belies the facts. On the other hand, there are 78-year-olds all over who I'm sure would swap conditions. I'm doing okay, but I'm not going out for a spot on the defensive front-four. I'm doing okay, but, my goodness, how I'd love to walk a hundred yards without having to find a place to sit.

So anyway we do a little ritual lately when something like a museum visit comes along. I ask Barbara--"take the cane or the walker"? Most often she says "walker" because she knows, as do I, that the worst possible scenario is me falling, something more likely happen with the cane than the cart. 

I took the cane. Doesn't make me look so fragile, so old.

Once I got through the urologist's fun questions at OC hospital, I got in the car and went to the museum, armed with the cane. 

When our guests showed up--the firsts half of them anyway--as you might have guessed, a ton of them were using a walker. All of the first half. Every one. Not a cane in the bunch. The museum was awash with walkers, and mine was home because, because why? it suggests weakness.

I'm doing okay, all right? If you see me around, you may ask me how I'm doing, but I'll do you the favor of letting you know right now--if you ask, I'll tell you "I'm doing okay--as long as I got the walker."  

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 32

 

“For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.”

 

“The gift that keeps on giving,” Garrison Keilor says, of guilt.  I don’t know many Jewish folks, nor enough Roman Catholics to generalize, but my guess is that guilt likely runs as rampant among believers of all stripes as does allergies or acne or avarice—or, for that matter any of the other Seven Deadlies. 

 I’m guessing no single group or fellowship holds a patent on guilt, but here in the upper Midwest, children of the northern European Protestants—Calvinists, Lutherans, and their Mennonite friends—seem to have it in spades. 

 For three decades and more, Garrison Keilor has been trading on dark and somber types, me included.  Today, he simply needs to mention the word “Lutheran,” and his listeners know exactly the darksome tone that is about to emerge from his tales. 

 There are tons of reasons for our excesses, I’m sure, but I’ll assert one of them—the degree to which we are affected by our environment; and here, on the Great Plains especially, the excesses of that environment. 

 Everything comes in spades where I live—winter’s cold, summer’s heat, rainfall, snow, drought, hail, tornadoes, and the ubiquitous, howling wind.  It’s no wonder we’re losing population out here.  Sometimes, when a hot wind takes off your face like a ratchet, I think General Zebulon Pike was right:  this really is the Great American Desert.  For more than a century we’ve been hoodwinked by real estate crooks.  Maybe we ought to sell the whole Upper Midwest to Ted Turner and his buffalo.

 I’m wandering.  We’re talking about guilt because that’s what David is talking about in verse three, and the weather here is a long way off.

 Here’s what I mean.  In the land where I live, it’s almost impossible not to be a victim of the weather.  A friend of mine moved to California; he said whenever he scheduled a game of golf, it took him more than a year to forget that he didn’t have to worry about bad weather. Here, everything—including livelihood, much of it agricultural—is dependent on weather, and the weather is often dangerously wicked.

 It’s a form of dependency we’re forced to accept and therefore it’s hard not to believe in some higher power.  Where I live, it takes some chutzpah to be arrogant when a 20-second hailstorm can get wipe you out completely.

 For better or for worse, those who feel God’s hand in the daily regimen of life find it easier to believe.  They know that when they’re safely in that almighty hand—when He’s holding us lovingly—we feel the greatest comfort life can offer. 

 But when that hand is pressing down upon us, the sober souls of Lake Woebegone know just as surely, as did King David, that its weight is impossible to bear. 

Perhaps what people say is true:  “a guilty conscience needs no accuser.”  But how much worse it is when the accuser is God almighty.  That’s the heaviness David feels in his bones and joints, day and night, as he says.

 Unrelenting.  Laughter helps a great deal—thank you, Garrison.  But David knows, from personal experience, that the only relief is forgiveness. 

 That’s what Psalm 32 is all about.

"Where the deer. . ." ii

 

You’ll find Smith County, Kansas, in the northern tier of counties, not all that far from Red Cloud, Nebraska, much-celebrated home of Willa Cather, yet another world-famous writer, a marvelous novelist whose bountiful book sales come nowhere near to the mega-thousands who could sing along with “Home on the Range” right now, with or without a fiddle or campfire.

Once upon a time Smith County, Kansas, became the dream of a pioneer doctor named, ingloriously, Brewster Higley--huge black beard atop a pair of wide square shoulders. Just imagine this, if you can—that man sitting outside a cave he’d just sculpted as his claim, the original "home on the range," that bear of a man sitting, alone, pen in hand, scribbling down verses as they came to him, gloriously describing, unmistakably, his brand new domicile in the west.

Oh! give me a gale of the Solomon vale,
Where the life streams with buoyancy flow;
Or the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever,
Any poisonous herbage doth grow.

Not all verses are universally beloved.

Dr. Brewster Higley is worth a novel himself, a man with a wonderful reputation for handling dozens of patients among the Kansas pioneers and, of all things, a poet, and a pioneer doctor, some believe—and not without reason—to have been a bit too interested in drinking what he’d carried in his own medicine bag, understandably, maybe—he had five wives (not at the same time).

Dr. Brewster Higley never made a dime on the hymn to the prairie the whole world sings. Nor did Daniel E. Kelly, Brewster Higley’s friend, a Civil War vet, the musician who first picked out a tune to carry Higley’s homage to the prairie.

Historians are pretty sure Kelly and Higley deserve the credit for America’s favorite hymn to the west, but neither made a dime on their most famous creation. The thing is, the ballad became popular so fast that it created a thousand variations almost immediately. How? Because everyone sang it, and not just cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, balladeers like Big Crosby and John Denver, just about everyone, including Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and the Simpsons.

Tell you what. Next time you’re in Smith County, Kansas, follow US 36 to Athol, then follow the signs to the Home on the Range Cabin, where the good doctor lived after his homestead hole in the ground.

It’s the least we can do.

Home on the Range cabin

"Home on the Range"

 

Pure speculation on my part, but what I’m betting at this very moment is that all you have to do is repeat the three-word title I’m using today and whether or not you’re a musicians, those words unwind themselves in your imagination musically—I’m saying you sang the words even as  you read them, and  you did so because of such unshakeable familiarity that it’s just plain impossible for most adult Americans not to burst into song.

What song? An old hymn to the glories of the west, to the beauty and grace of our home out here in fly-over country.

“Oh, give me a home

Where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and antelope play…”

You know the words darn well.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our only four-term President (‘33, height of the Depression to ‘45, end of Second World War) loved America’s hymn, even though Siouxlanders of his time would have called him a city slicker. It’s tough to imagine FDR sitting in front of a roaring fire in his office and, accompanied by staff, suddenly breaking into song. But it happened and more than once, a sing-along in the Oval Office, the whole gang, including Mr. President, in the lead.

With that kind of billing, “O Give Me a Home,” in 1934 sat comfortably  atop the nation’s top-40, numero uno. Among whom? Most all of America. Your particular origins were of no consequence; no matter how far you roamed from the shadow of Statue of Liberty, you sang it. As ordinary as Iowa mud—well, moreso.

Richard Byrd, the renowned explorer, claimed he sang “Home on the Range” more frequently than he would have liked to during his lonely six-month sojourn at the North Pole, especially when his phonograph froze up, forcing him to solo with nary the help of a harmonica. Penguins don’t like us reading their old reviews, but rumor has it they weren’t all that grand. The whole world knew that the homesickness for the plains that’s at the heart of a tune the whole world sings.

Where seldom is heard

A discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

You know. I know. We all know.

______________________

A little more tomorrow.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer”

Yesterday, I mowed my lawn. I thought it would be a quick job because I’d done it less than week before. I am not one of those Dutch folk who believe that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is found somewhere in Leviticus. But in summer, when I spend hours and hours in the basement clicking computer keys, come mid- to late afternoon I love to get outside and do some honest, sweaty labor in the vineyard of our backyard, where we don’t, of course, have a vineyard.

Yesterday, the grass out front was long enough to call in the sheep. So I mowed, and the clippings—our yard is thick with maple seed whirlybirds right now—filled up the bed of my son-in-law’s big pick-up. The rainfall this spring has been magnificent.

By late July, I likely won’t be able to walk barefoot on my grass because what’s left will be yellowed cactus points. By July, I’ll cut the lawn once every three weeks at best, and then mostly weeds, the only verdure that prospers once the rains stop.

Only once in the near-fifty years that I’ve lived here have I seen a black cloud rolling in, a storm of dust. Only once. But that day I won’t forget because it prompted fear from a memory I don’t have—a vision from the Dust Bowl that turned prairie into the Sahara not all that far west from here.

By November, 1933, dust storms had roared by for years already, in the middle of a drought that went on for ten years. People were actually accustomed to hacking up mud from their throats, to enclosing drinking water in Mason jars to keep it from turning brown, even in the house, to knead bread inside drawers drawn just wide enough to allow their hands inside.

But what came on Armistice Day that November was like nothing else.

In 1923, about two hours northwest of here, a man named A. Karstrom retired and went to town, leaving his son the 470-acre spread that made Mr. Karstrom a good living. What followed was thirteen progressively bad years and the Black Blizzard, which broke his son’s heart and back, the air an image of midnight. In the heat and dust, the farm blew away. Four years later, a new owner took over a place that hadn’t been lived and moved five tons of sand from the acreage. Five tons. That’s how dry it was just northwest of here in 1933. That’s how lifeless.

The NIV, in verse four, holds on to a bit of what the KJV used to say. “My moisture is turned into the drought of summer” has been changed to “my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Sapped is the link, as if the sap, the fluid, of David’s soul has dried up by the torturous heat of his own sin and misery. What’s in him is drought, dust. When he looks up from his anguish, all he sees is a black blizzard.

His spirit and strength is as lifeless as that Karstrom farm. Even if the weather turns, he can’t move in the tons of choking dust that rises in his heart and throat.

What he needs is someone to carry away all those tons of dust, to bring him back, to refresh him with living water.

And that’s the story of Psalm 32, his story and ours. Black blizzards turned miraculously verdant by the living water of God’s own forgiveness. That’s the story all right.

Me and politics ii

In 2007 I wasn't ready to sign into anyone's campaign, wasn't particularly "political," but I loved the idea of a black man getting even close to the Presidency. Besides, it appeared that this particular  candidate had no scandals connected to him, carried a background in community organizing, and loved basketball. I'm quite sure I noticed the t-shirt in one of those pop-up ads that come unrequested from the internet, and liked the idea of this one--a sort of football jersey thing. 

I don't remember how much it cost, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap--and it's a good one. I gambled that its subtlety would make it wearable in Sioux County, Iowa--or so I believed. After all, it didn't just blast out his name; it seemed, first of all, a jersey, and then a political statement.

In 2007 I was edging close to retirement and going over to the college gym early in the morning, along with other colleagues and other emeriti. I don't know that I would have worn that shirt to the downtown mall or a church picnic, but the gym was sparsely populated so early in the morning. I wasn't sure all my friends' eyes were even open.

I was wrong. Two colleagues ripped at me and my shirt, were not only open about their disapproval but voluble in what seemed their hate for Obama. I don't know that either of them said it in their summary anger, but today I'm quite sure their anti-Obama vehemence grew from his toleration of abortion, not his race. At least I'd like to think that was the truth. Whatever their specific motivation, I wasn't accustomed to being slaughtered in public--in front of others--by old friends who thought an Obama t-shirt an abomination, an outright sin. Ripped, screamed at, scolded--one of the prophets of doom was a woman, the other a man. Their whippings happened at different times and different spots in the gym, but both were very public. 

Their shocking fusillades made me more of an Obama supporter, but I didn't wear that t-shirt to early morning workouts again.

Just a couple of mornings later, I happened to come away from the workout with another retiree, the just-retired President of the college, who'd heard part of one of those Jeremiads. "Just thought you'd like to know," he said, whispered, as if we were behind enemy lines, "Louise and I think you're right, but it's not something I can say publicly." I was being commended.

That made me even more sure that my jersey was a good buy.

On January 3, 2008, I caucused for Barack Obama in the traditional Iowa way, by walking over to the side of the room those in charge had set off for the Obama supporters. Most of my liberal friends caucused for John Edwards, who would nosedive soon after. 

As everyone knows, that  night was a huge and unexpected win for the skinny Obama, and I still have the t-shirt. It's been a pj for all of these years so it's in great shape. 

And today, I'm a registered Democrat.

Me and politics -- 1

I'm quite sure everyone we knew in Arizona was Republican--shoot, even the liberals were Republican, as was the newspaper, the Arizona Republic. The Goldwater effect was very much alive, as was the man with dark-rimmed glasses. In the community where we lived, it was just about impossible to be a Democrat. Besides, my family was Republican, so I'd never done much thinking when it came to politics. The truth?--I'm embarrassed by how conservative I was back then,  but then so was everybody else.

So when we moved to Iowa, I told myself it was time--new place, new times, new rootedness--to participate in American political system, so I did. The Sioux County Republicans were meeting at TePaske Theater on some Thursday night that bicentennial fall, so I went, alone, and sat somewhere  in the back. I was a conservative, but I no right-winger. I'd attended a meeting of the local John Birch Society when I was in high school, a strangely clandestine gathering in the top floor of a lakefront mansion in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, maybe a dozen people who sat around watching a slide/tape program (remember those?) of shots featuring Martin Luther King shaking hands with men who were supposedly known communists. This was Wisconsin, after all, and blood from Sen. McCarthy's whacko hack jobs still pooled in the sandy soil hither and yon.

What I witnessed in TePaske Theater in August, 1976, was a political convention that made me ill because the dialogue was pretty much the same as it was in that little meeting in the lakefront mansion a decade ago. Men--I don't remember seeing any women--would raise their hands and contribute comments drawn from what seemed to me to be Depression-era sentiment. I wanted no part of it. My first political visit in our new home in Iowa was also my last. 

To say it turned me into a Democrat would be presumptive. I would have asked the age-old question back then about tigers changing stripes. It was impossible to think of myself as a Democrat. I didn't know my grandfathers' political leanings, but I knew I didn't have to ask--they were thoroughly Republican, as was my dad. I couldn't have thought of myself as Democratic. They were liberals, the sworn enemy for most of my life.

In the following years I tried to avoid party labels. I voted for McGovern, the prairie populist who promised to end the Vietnam war; but then I went Republican during the Bush years, trying to stay like W and his father somewhere close to the middle.

By '08, I'd had enough conservatism, enough tiddly-winks with wedge issues, enough clap-trap from the conservative world to make me look left, where I saw and heard someone who appeared out of nowhere, a guy with a horrible name that most conservatives opposed, not because he was black--of course, not because he was black. Of course. 

When the Iowa caucuses came around early in 2008, I'm not sure I had a political affiliation, but I had decided opinions, and those opinions formed around two particular candidates, this black guy with the awful name and, of all things, a woman named Hillary. But before the rise of anyone to the top, there were more candidates, including a liberal from New Mexico, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards, a politician a bald guy like me couldn't trust because he had such perfect hair.

___________________ 

Tomorrow--memories of the '08 race.

"Field of Dreams"

It went something like this, I guess. The filmmakers started with sixty pictures of Iowa farms thought to be possibilities for making this movie. What they wanted, of course, was endless cornfields where there was the fairly substantial promise that the crop would come up tall and healthy, and where, out west of the place ("if you build it, they will come") gorgeous sunsets would delight the evening sky. 

So, the story goes that the woman appointed to do the choosing, a woman named Sue Reidel, got to a photograph of the Lansing farmstead, down a lonely gravel road, and, just like that, went for it--"perfect." The truth is that they trucked in water early that summer, pulled it all the way from Lake Michigan, because they needed to be sure that the corn that season would reach optimum height. Otherwise, once the decision was made, the Lansing place started to take shape as a baseball diamond.

The man who wrote the book Shoeless Joe that became the movie is a Canadian writer named W. P. Kinsella, who went on to have a successful career as a novelist and died ten years ago already. The story, the novel, and the film all employ what people call magical realism--no, gangs of dead baseball players didn't come walking out of the corn like they do so gracefully in the movie. That's magic realism.

Thursday night, the Minnesota Twins will face off against the Philadelphia Phillies, real, live professional teams, not spirits or ghosts or fantasies. Tickets are long gone, but Netflix will put the game up for those of us who can't make it all the way across the state. 

That t-shirt at the top of the page is mine, purchased for me by an old friend who told me some time in the 90s that he was taking his family out east and stopping at Dyersville just to see "the field of dreams." He was just eccentric enough to do that, so I told him, jokingly, to pick me up a t-shirt. He did. 

Sometime later, this old friend was killed on a Sioux Center street when struck by a truck. That death--and something of his life--is somewhere in it, a stain in the old t-shirt only my eyes can see. It can't be removed. It's not just another t-shirt. It's been with me for decades.

Anyway, I'll be watching Thursday night. 

A Joey photo shoot*

It was the kind of little shack that had no use whatsoever. It stood behind their house, just off the alley out back, and when the old retired farmer and his wife decided, once and for all, to get rid of the thing, someone came along, picked it up, and hauled it off.

Unearthing thereby a nest of opossums suddenly turned up, four or five joeys (little possums) totally incapable of escaping the back of the old lady's spade. Our kids were kids, and they were out back, witness to the carnage. The old woman showed no mercy. They came home heavy with grief, anger, and total disbelief.

Me? They were only opossums.

I hit one with our brand-new, silver '64 Impala, just weeks after getting my license. I was driving a party of teenagers around to school that night, on our way to the prom, specially selected as cool sophomore servers. I know exactly where I hit that beady-eyed beast--it was just a couple miles from Hingham. Whack! Thump! All night long I heard that sound. That death haunted the prom. And it was only an opossum.

Truth is, I've often wondered what kind of joke the Lord perpetuated on us when he created the opossum, ugly rooters with eerie pink hands and a fleshy pig snout to match. What a mistake. 

When I was no older than my kids were that day in the alley, I saw one shot dead. I was out on a trap line with a loving man the prototype for the father in my first novel, Home Free. 

His father gave him the flashlight, aimed, and squeezed the trigger of the .22. The shot was muffled, silenced. They stood there, waiting for the motion to cease. The animal pawed at its forehead, at the perfect hole between its eyes, as if somehow it could scratch out the lead. "Possum," his father had said, as if it were some kind of eulogy.

My words, my sentences, years ago, drawn from my childhood experience of the first murder I'd ever seen. But it was only a 'possum.

So 'possums and me, we've got enough of a history, enough for me to recognize this little one coming up the trail toward me yesterday (see him up top?) on a sunny winter solstice afternoon. I knew 'possums didn't see well, and the wind was at his back, not mine. So I stood still, camera in hand, while Joey snooted around along the well-traveled back road along the river. 

In fact, kept coming at me as if I weren't there, kept coming until I barked at him to let him know that I wasn't just some cottonwood. He snarled a little and wiggled off--opossums come from the factory with only low gear. 

So I shot this little one with a camera, walked back home, and opened the files. 

Now pardon me for giggling. But what I found is a regular portrait gallery. It was as if Joey is coming up on graduation, and he or she wanted a senior portrait. I might not have chosen the season (first day of winter) or the place (a foot of snow on a river bank), but this Joey in buffalo coat was determined. I don't know why I say it, but this he has got to be a she. 

So here's Joey, class of '17, River Floyd High. She needs something comely for the high school annual. I'll send her proofs today. I know where to find her. 

Got a favorite? Here's a sexy little peek-a-boo.

This one left her a bit more exposed. Darling pose though, isn't it?

Got a couple of her outside the weeds too.

Tried something full body, with less than wonderful results. That winter fur makes you think her roots are gray. They are, I guess. But I'm thinking there's something in this pose a little cheeky for a high school girl, don't you think? But then, nowadays. . .

My favorite? Something close up, even though I think I'd have preferred a bit of powder on her nose.

Now at least she's got possibilities. I hope she's not too picky--she didn't seem to be yesterday. 

I swear I always thought the Creator of Heaven and Earth simply released possums out into the world about a week or so before he had the design down. 

But I've got to admit it--this Joey is almost cute. 

________________________________

*from December 21, 2016

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“When I kept silent, 

my bones wasted away 

through my groaning all day long”

I’m not sure I know why myself—and I’m not sure I want to know—but one of the first novels I read that simply wouldn’t exit the chambers of my heart was Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope, a novel of sin and self-righteousness, set in apartheid South Africa. The pulsating portrayal of Pieter van Vlaanderin’s guilt simply wouldn’t let me alone. I became him—like I said, I don’t know why.

Van Vlaanderin, a police officer sworn to uphold laws which keep races apart, has sexual relations with a black woman. His marriage is cold and stultifying, but he knows very well that his sin is not his wife’s fault. In the face of his own overwhelming desire, he falls. But he doesn’t get away with it, and the truth comes out.

The real horror of the story, however, is his inability to find forgiveness. The sorrow in his heart just won’t go away.

Too Late the Phalarope put me through agonies more terrifying than any I’d ever undergone myself when, as an undergraduate, I read the novel. When van Vlaanderin kept silent, his bones wasted away through his groaning all day long, and so did mine. Reading the novel was excruciating, and that’s why it was so memorable.

And I’m not sure that’s why, perhaps, Too Late the Phalarope comes to mind when I read the third verse of Psalm 32: I can’t help thinking of the bone-wasting agonies of Pieter van Vlaanderin, a white man from apartheid South Africa and a supposedly God-fearing family, a man who couldn’t find forgiveness.

Post the Bathsheeba-saga, David’s bones shook with horror and guilt at what he’d done. We know that’s true, after all, from Psalm 51. “My sin is always before me,” David says, after Nathan let him know the truth. Full of misery, David asks the Lord for forgiveness: “Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.”

Some scholars speculate that Psalm 32 should really be Psalm 52. The 32nd Psalm seems, after all, a kind of retrospective poem David might have written to explain exactly what happened when finally he found the forgiveness he was looking for in Psalm 51. “This is how it went,” he seems to say. Then he explains how it was that he acknowledged his sin and confessed. David’s songs—both 32 and 52—record the reality of God’s forgiveness only because they first acknowledge the reality of his sin, or so it seems to me.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Psalm 32 begins in defining blessedness as the condition of the forgiven, the state of mind and soul of those who know that every last inch of the blackened corners of their hearts have been scoured, those who don’t try to cover things, those who conceal nothing from the watchful eyes of God—as if they could.

I sometimes wonder whether those who confess faith in God can really know his grace if they haven’t known their own sin, if they haven’t felt the groaning of their bones, as David says, if they haven’t felt something of to the horror that Pieter van Vlaanderin knew—as did David.

Answer me this: how can anyone know grace without knowing sin?

Change

My heart doesn't know exactly how to take this. On the one hand, it creates a smile because the picture, ten years old now, shows grandkids as kids. They still are, of course, especially to a grandpa, but they no longer wear those clothes. They can't. They're a decade older.

Ian, the youngest, will be a junior in high school. Pieter, who's wearing a t-shirt from his uncle and aunt in Stillwater, does all kinds of maintenance work at a plant just outside of town that spins E10 gas out of endless acres of corn all around. He's also in love.

And the high-schooler, back then, the girl holding the dog, is twice a mom, a young married. 

Oh, yes--I said my heart doesn't know how to take that picture on top because we don't really reverse time, and there's a bounty of sweet sadness to that picture because it captures a world that's gone. That's sadness. 

But then there's this too.

 

Just a couple of days ago--that high schooler's second cherub. That's sweet.

Great Plains

 

Ten years ago, a colleague and I led an excursion west of here, into the Great Plains--the mandate? to meet and greet one of the continent's most stunning regions, a place blessed with huge skies and endless ranges. 

When I look at these photographs from that experience, I am--even today, a decade ago--still wondrously blessed.

Every year at Yellowstone, someone gets hurt by the monarchs of the plains. We made it through without injury and all of us were greatly blessed.

"like an umbrella"

Sometimes it seems that the present administration is capable of producing a few rollicking old stories as good as anything from the pens of Gilbert and Sullivan. I mean, there are far bigger stories, far more reasons to despair than the new, sickly green color of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is a war in Iran--or is there? There's a newly invigorated socialist movement in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There's an ancient overweight would-be monarch who seems utterly incapable of holding on to power, given polls that increasingly and convincingly make him look like a loser. And there's a few moments of sheer hilarity.

Those off-color reflecting pools have been raising a stink for weeks already, but last week they turned into created a flood of madness when Janine Pirro, one of Trump's oldest and most trusted buddies and recently named the U.S. District Attorney for DC, ushered her own version of the truth into the fray and blamed the horror on shoddy workmanship, an indictment that made another explanation loyalist in Trumpster camp look, well, dumb, former gov of North Dakota, Doug Bergum. It  appears that there was long ago on capitol hill some bad blood coursing through both of their veins toward or with each other--about what I don't know. 

Trump, who is not practiced at keeping his mouth shut, laid into his old friend (and Fox News-er), Ms. Pirro, offering her newly documented explanation for the green mess on incompetent handlers. That did not sit well with the boss, who characterized Ms. Pirro's new explanation memorably, by saying "she folded like an umbrella," a line that set lips a grinnin' all over town. Yet that day, the Fox News barrister was spotted leaving her office complex all by her lonesome, packing enough ammunition to end the battle, if not the war. 

What happened? It's unclear, except it seems that the meeting with the king left him mellowed a bit, in a state of mind a few notches below "fold like an umbrella."

Much ado, much ado.

Sometimes I wonder what the American public will expect of his immediate successors--MAGA or not. This one has made the f-word pretty much standard political dialect. He's strangely off -key more often than a kid trying the violin. His anger at one of his oldest and trusted friends resulted from his having to field questions about her refusing to stay with his much preferred vandalism story, the explanation he liked, true or not. Trump goes unhinged because one of his trusted lieutenants told the truth when a lie was the much-preferred route , or so he directed. 

Are we going to take that from whoever replaces him in two years? Are we going to want another number 1 who blows a gasket when someone tells the truth? Can there be another? Are there others? 

I don't know. I'd like to believe he's one of a kind.

Paternity -- denouement

Denouement isn't exactly just an English teacher's word. It looks and feels and is French in origin, but it refers to the story's answer to this question: "so what?" What effect did the story have on a kid named Gary, on his life. 

I had options--it ruined it, is one. Another would be that it retooled him into the angel he never was. Options are many, most of them rise from a place on a continuum that stretches between poles in just about everyone's life--on one end profound effects, and on the other, minimal. 

That Gary is telling the story does more than suggest that his father's haymow lesson has most certainly affected him. Would it prompt him to chase down Cassie and the child? I chose not to end the story with him claiming a son or daughter somewhere, but I wanted him to live the indictment his dad inflicted on him that dusty, hot day in Trillian's haymow.

Here's the denouement, the story's end. This is how the story ends:

*

Two years ago, I was divorced. I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places, but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So, I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live.

Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl.

Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same.

But I couldn’t help thinking when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking.

*

I doubt my mom and dad ever read the story, but they might have. Here's what I would have liked to explain to them, parents who probably never understood what their son was up to by writing stories like "Paternity." Let the writer take the denouement apart:

Two years ago, I was divorced [I wanted to suggest that his life hasn't been a bowl of cherries--is that because of what happened one summer on the lakeshore? I didn't care to have him somehow blame what happened with Cassie on her, but neither did I want him to simply forget it. This line deliberately suggests that he hasn't.] I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places, but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So, I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live. [The phenomenon I noted one year at about the time our kids were approaching middle-school age, when we went to the Tulip Festival in Orange City: preening high school kids in tank tops in the warm, late spring.]

Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. [Making him a teacher was easy--I was one.] My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job [A friend of mine told me he did that--explaining that his students weren't a whole lot like the kids we knew growing up. What Gary doesn't say, but what he thinks is that his kids come from homes not so ship-shape as the home he grew up in]. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl. [I didn't want him obsessed, but that he was reminded every once in a while was, I thought, a good thing, a state of mind his father had accurately predicted.]

Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same. 

But I couldn’t help thinking [it's something he remembers--"can't help it")when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking. [This is a tribute to his father. "Sometimes talking" suggests his father's silence is a feature he remembers and appreciates. It suggests, as imaginative literature always does, that Gary looks back at what happened one day in a lakeshore haymow as something he's drawn from the respect he had for his father.]

For now, let me lay out the roots of this story, roots that start, oddly enough with a darling pair of Dutch bunnies, the belted kind. Where they weren’t white, they were brown, not black. I bought them at a twice-a-year auction that, long ago, was the wildest and most fascinating auction in a six-county region. These bunnies were darling—or did I say that already? —and they were comfortable enough to tolerate each other as roomies. A boy and a girl, just like our kids, neat as neat can be.

Call me a bad parent, but I substituted doing the chores my children were supposed to do, daily, but had some trouble getting accomplished—feed the bunnies, keep their cage nice and clean, and play with them. Promise me that and, okay, Dad will buy a couple of those cuties. Most of those responsibilities got left to their father, but I started to love getting up in the morning and going out to the barn out back, as if I was some old retired farmer.

On Easter morning that year—sun bright and shiny in the sky—I went out to greet the day and found both bunnies gone. Initially, I worried about some kind of crime--they had been stolen! I looked around, all through the cage, which stood just outside the old barn, on the south side.

No bunnies.

It was Easter morning, a particularly religious holiday. If we had easter eggs, they came from our kids’ friends. Barbara and I weren’t big on Easter bunnies, save the wonderful twosome out back, who’d blessed our kids with brown and white fluff.

Quite quickly, I determined that telling the kids their bunnies were gone would be out of the question—I mean, my own soul felt bitten through. What might happen to them—and on Easter too?

So off we went to church. Barbara knew, but the two Schaap kids were innocent as lambs, more so.

All through the trumpets of Easter morning worship, all I could think about was those two bunnies, our kids’ bunnies, and how I would have to break the news that would have assuredly broken them. How would I say it? Where would we sit to tell them? They’d bawl, but would I?

Don’t ask me how the worship service went—I was parked in another zone.

When we got home, I snuck outside after telling Barb I was going to do one more search.

I did, and, amazingly, I found the two little sweeties balled up together beneath the neighbor’s lawn mower. I flipped the deck up and there they were, not fifty feet away, burrowed in the long grass beneath that old mower.

None of that is in the story, but, trust me, all of it is.

I was so incredibly relieved that it seemed impossible to believe. I had put myself into an emotional ringer because I had no idea how I would explain to my kids the deaths or absence of their two warm and snuggly bunnies.

I don’t know why, but that morning I happened to think about ending a pregnancy, about abortion, about what it was. And what I ran into was a contrast my mind couldn’t help but project. For pity’s sake, a rabbit left me at wits end, an animal--a terribly cute pair of them, but not a creature blessed with a soul. Their mysterious absence flat-out ruined my Easter morning.

Now let me be clear. I’m not a huge anti-abortion kind of guy. Politically, I’m most often on the progressive side. I’ve long ago had my fill of hyper-Christians who can’t or won’t take the time to empathize with those (especially women) who would just as soon not let the state tell them what to do with their bodies.

I’m not a fierce anti-abortion guy, but the comparison was too evident in my own life: I was long gone from the Easter worship that morning because my mind, my heart, and my soul were consumed by the startling absence of two rabbits.

There’s a story here, I told myself, something about taking human life more seriously. That’s something this whole arrangement of Easter morning events had made clear.

And then there was this. We’d heard the story from friends of ours, how a young lady somewhat prematurely pregnant with child had told her parents that it wasn’t that big of a deal—“it’ll all be over by volleyball.”

There’s something so patently ridiculous, so insanely juvenile, about that remark—and something totally childlike in its precious innocence. I gave the story to a football player.

I’ve never written a story that’s more "pro-life" than "Paternity." I doubt they ever knew.