Old scans--Vietnam Spectators

[A series of essays from half-a-lifetime ago]

Vietnam never laid a hand on me; I never saw a rice paddy or walked the Saigon streets, or awakened to the thwacking rush of Army helicopters. I've never stumbled through a jungle. The shape of Cambodia I remember only from the map Richard Nixon pointed to in May of 1970.

But neither did I go to jail or leave for Canada, or sugar my urine or brace my teeth or make any other attempt to avoid Vietnam. Nobody ever begged me to return home years later; neither President Ford nor Carter ever offered me amnesty. I was, throughout the entire era, little more than a spectator.

We still live, all of us, in the shadow of that era, even those who, like me, bear no visible scars. Just recently, I framed the cover page of an old student newspaper and hung it on my wall-five clenched fists boldly underlined with one word, "Strike."

It's an artifact now, a symbol of an era that has slipped into the objective past of a whole new generation of college students, already part of a nation's history and, therefore, of little more than passing interest to an undergraduate busily preparing himself for one of life's marketable skills. That clenched fist has lost its grip on America's emotions; today it needs a footnote.

But subconsciously Vietnam is still with us, all of us, even those it passed by. Spectators take their thrills vicariously and thereby keep their knees intact. But the memory of a rough game stays with them. Whether we went to Canada or Saigon or we stayed home, Vietnam, for all of us who grew up in the late sixties, is more than a memory.

For those of us who didn't go, "Where were you during Vietnam?" is more a pointed question of honor than of simple information.

And our answers invariably carry some supplemental narratives to verify the fact that we were alive at the time:

"We were here, but we marched." Somehow, it doesn't matter. We took neither the supreme act of loyalty and went to Southeast Asia, nor the supreme act of conscience and went to jail or Canada. For many of us spectators, the 4-F--in 1970 the classification of freedom--has become, years later, the badge of failure it was meant to be. Today, the 4-F triggers a sense of guilt for not having been to either Vietnam or Canada.

In the spring of 1968, on the night Lyndon Johnson opted out of the presidential race, I was among hundreds of sunburned northern college students wriggling away at a dance on Daytona Beach. In May of 1970, I told my college baseball coach that my marching against the war meant more to me than catching a Saturday doubleheader, and I left for Washington. The token scars I bear from that era lie no deeper than a skipped double-header. So high, for me, honor soared.

But I remember the almost vicious sense of righteousness in the eyes of a Navy vet who came home early in 1967, convinced that anything less than a full offensive in Vietnam was cowardly and defeatist. He had no toleration for argument. Vietnam turned his spirit to stone. And I remember the bloodied knuckles of a roommate in 1969, a vet whose adjustment to home staggered through long nights of drinking and fighting. Vietnam blessed him with an appetite for action that straight-life in small-town Iowa couldn't satisfy. His memories wouldn't let him sleep. These were the real scars of Vietnam.

A decade later I sat alone in an armchair late one night and watched two of my peers, two 30-year-old drunken Vietnam vets hugging and crying like children, as if all of it-the dope and the death, the absolute lunacy of a war few of them wanted to fight-as if all of it had ended just a week before. And I sat there trying my human best to empathize. It was all I could do as an outsider.

We all share in the guilt over Vietnam--the hawks, the doves and even the spectators. For those who watched, a decade later it's the specter of not having lived-at least of not having headlined, at most, not having suffered.

The agony and the torment, the courage and the selflessness belong to those who acted, either out of obedience or disobedience-and not to those who watched. We have no answers to where we were during Vietnam, and our muteness today is an odd kind of cross in itself.

Perhaps, at a decade's distance, we can call this odd guilt some rugged masculine urges left sheathed and unsatisfied. Perhaps it's the guilt of having been passive in an age that demanded action. Perhaps it's only the army legacy of the 4-F classification. Whatever it is, it stings some of us today when we watch films like Apocalypse Now or read books like The Things They Carried. Vietnam was an era that, for better or worse, belongs to the other guys, even though we were there.

In August of 1970, I lived just outside Madison, Wisconsin and had just begun my first year of teaching when the blast at the Army Research Center on the University of Wisconsin campus shook windows all over town and killed an innocent graduate student. It was the end of the days of the romantic rebellion in this country, and I knew it. The war itself would be over in a matter of time and a few thousand more lives.

I had seen it all, from the beginning-from the days of the military advisers, the days when the cloak of communism was laid over the backs of the first dissenters, through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Cambodian incursion, to Kent State, a dead research chemist, and a pitiful, hasty retreat from Saigon; and all of it through the pall of far too many thousand American and Southeast Asian war dead. But the story belonged to the others-those who acted.

This is the scar of my Vietnam days, my guilt. This is where I was during Vietnam, and where it's left me today, ten years it laid a hand on me just as it did on just about everyone else.

Old scans--"Canonization for Anna"

[The third in a series of little essays written half-a-lifetime ago.]

Anna is out of intensive care now, and I guess that's why I'm saying this. Because it strikes me--now that she has wrestled through a fight with her heart--it strikes me that we are far too good at eulogies. Nice things are always easy to say after the funeral. But today Anna came out of intensive care.

Anna is an organist in our church--self-taught for the most part--and a Sunday school teacher for three or four generations probably. When I was a boy we feared Anna because her grim face wore no emotion; her lips were locked together in a twist that was neither smile nor frown. We read it as perpetual disgust.

Sunday school programs brought out the worst in her. A hundred kids with lit fuses would shoot around the church sanctuary during practice the night before. "You fourth graders, act your age!" She would always snap at us. When she'd turn to the fifth graders, someone would mimic her for sure. Years later I discovered that Anna created those annual programs.

Anna never married. In a church of families, even kids don't quite know how to take women who don't marry. They're different, and a boy starts recognizing such things about the same time he starts reading the script writing carved into the Communion table at the front of the church he's attended for ten years. Suddenly, it's just there. Fourth-grade boys just figured a woman like Anna-sour Anna-couldn't get a man. Meanwhile, another Christmas program would come and go.

Halfway through adolescent rebellion, I thought Anna was an icon of the staid, traditional, immovable church of my youth. Fashions arrived and left, but Anna's hair looked forever the same, as if she'd surrendered to being out of time. I swore that the older she grew the slower she played the organ, until even the bouncy hymns poked along like the old alms. And always you would see the expressionless face up there, lighted by the soft glow of organ light. She chewed gum, not vigorously but quickly, nervously, when she played.

Years have passed since then. Today the church pays a music director to order a Christmas show from some slick Christian catalog out of Texas, but Anna is still teaching Sunday school, and now she has my own three-year-old boy. No one else her age teaches, because kids have a way of forcing early retirements, just as they always did. But there is a smile on Anna's face whenever we drop our son off with her for Sunday school. It's a smile unlike anything we ever saw before on her face, a smile that surprised me at first. And Anna has a permanent now, her curly gray hair curled up tight around her head like any of a dozen other women in church.

Time fills in gaps the way dawn colors a lakeshore landscape. Some things I know now about Anna. I know now that Anna cared for her parents until the day each of them died. I know now that her father was no gentle man to live with-blustery, hardheaded, stubborn as the toughest Hollander. I know now that when he was gone, every Sunday she dressed her mother, set her in the wheelchair, and pushed the old woman to church, even when she knew her mother understood little of the sermon. I know now that giving her life to them was a thankless, blessed job that might have turned anyone's face into something grim, something less than radiant.

I know now that the woman who never married regularly plays grandmother to two little blond-haired boys no older than my own son, two little boys her niece was left alone with when their father ran off with another.

Why does she smile that way today, twenty years after a class of fourth-grade boys decided she was much too owly to be a good teacher? Why does my son love her today? Why does he curl around my leg and turn away from her when she talks to him, as if he's embarrassed to have all of her attention himself? Why does Anna smile?

Maybe it's because life is easier for her now, later on in her years. Maybe the privileged burden of her parents' care is there behind her, settled in the pages of her mind like yellowed photographs. Maybe the anxiety of being alone has settled into a firm assurance that all things have worked together for good. Maybe playing grandmother has swelled the limits of her tolerance. Maybe the smile is simply the inherent reward of many years of Christmas programs interspersed annually in a lifetime of quiet selflessness.

Four hundred years ago we reformed the church and stopped canonization, stopped making saints. Maybe it's a shame. Today we don't know how to revere those who give themselves, all of themselves, through us to God. We let them pass on too easily, and we don't elevate them like heroes. After all, what was Abraham to David but a symbol of belief and courage, of faith and promise.

So this is for you, Anna. And this is for me. And this is for our son. And this is for our Lord.

I'm happy you're out of intensive care, and so is my son.

Old scans--"Andy"

[continued from yesterday]

Then, when he was about sixteen, it was over. He never fought. He never had any more attacks. He rarely even came in the restaurant any more. He never talked to us. He only went to school.

His eyelids barely moved all day. He walked slowly. He stumbled down steps in the old brick, three story high school. His head dropped down, his neck loose, he seemed always to be nearly sleeping. And it was safe for us. Rarely did he explode into a frantic rage. Rarely did we find him sprawling on the floor in some contorted and horrifying fit. And it was all so safe. The answer was dope. No, he never bought it off the street; he never had to. It came from the doctor, and it changed his life. He stopped playing in the band. I don't even remember him as a senior.

And then I left to go to college. Occasionally my mother would speak of him when I visited. "Andy's in Memorial Hospital," she'd say. "Mental ward." Several years later: "Andy's at the County Hospital; you know they don't put them there unless they don't think they'll come back." Sometime later: "Andy's at Pine Rest-Ben Vander Aa was in Grand Rapids and he thought he'd try to talk to him. Said he was really bad, couldn't even understand a word."

So Andy's not been in my mind for many years. And Andy's not had his own mind either for many years. Our Andys are so pleasant to forget, because our Andys are an inconvenience in our lives and even make us miserable. They disturb our order. They sprawl out in our beautiful suburban lives like horrid nightmares, like very unwanted guests. Our Andys are dried blood on a clean white shirt. And when they die we say that we remember them because a memory is sometimes a rather safe place for us to hide.

And it's easy to come up with some Pharisaical way of dealing with our Andys and their slow but often inevitable ends. "There but for the grace of God ... " is a favorite. “Andys teach us to be thankful for what we are." "Andys humble us." "Andys are God-given symbols of our own sin and misery."

But Andy wasn't a symbol; he wasn't an object lesson for my pride. Andy was a human being. He looked like all the rest of us when he pulled on his suit for swimming lessons. And often I saw him cry. I heard him laugh. I heard him swear. I heard him pray when it was his turn. I saw blood squirt from his lips. And he was always so embarrassed after a seizure, and angry because he never really knew it had happened himself. It was something outside of him, something that possessed him--something that finally killed the spirit in him.

Sometimes easy answers aren't sufficient. Sometimes we can't dismiss our Andys with some kind of cheap theology. Sometimes it's wrong to see our Andys in a kind of concentric world where everybody else exists only to teach us some truth. That kind of world is built on something called pride.

I don't know what to do with Andy today. I don't know where he fits in my neat little catechism; I don't know if it's even right for me to think that I'm supposed to learn something from Andy's life. Maybe it's good for us to be awed by the sheer complexity of this world God has created, the world we have messed.

Sometimes there's little we can do but work and pray.

Old Scans--"Andy"

[The second of a series of little essays from half-a-lifetime ago.] 

Last week my mother called just to say that things were fine and so forth. No real news, it's just that calling seems to be so much easier than sitting down and writing and all. "And if you do it at the right time it really doesn't cost all either.” So my nephew cut his foot at school and my niece is growing nicely, almost talking already, and my sister’s youngest is enjoying school. 

And, oh yes, do you remember Andy? I think he was a year older than you were. Well, he's not well at all now. And it's been really rough on him and his parents. Maybe his death will be some kind of release, you know? The whole story is so sad. You remember him, don't you? You haven't been away that long.

Yes, Mom, I remember Andy. I remember him as a long dangling vine of a boy who wasn't the worst of the fifth grade basketball players. And I remember that he played third base on the little league baseball team, although he didn't play all that much, just some warm-ups and maybe late in the game if we'd be way ahead or way behind. 

And I remember him as being smart, too. Never the first one down in a spelling-bee; maybe not the smartest in the class, but no clown. But more than all that, I remember him defending himself against most of the others, myself included, fighting for something which I can only today identify as dignity. Andy was willing to swing, willing to suffer split lips for something money couldn't buy, and something he probably never felt he achieved. Andy was different.

He lacked nothing upstairs, and he was never the last kid chosen in playground basketball, but we all knew that at any moment, anywhere, he could fall over as if he had been shot by some invisible assassin. Right in the middle of a game, four on four, suddenly we'd discover him, legs and arms akimbo, sprawled out over the cold, wet blacktop, his body quivering and jumping and rolling as if something or someone in him was trying frantically to break free. His eyes still roll in my memory, and I see that contorted face so clearly that if I were an artist I could easily draw it, always bent off to the left shoulder at the neck, jerking, snapping, as if trying to pull itself away from an image it saw in a mirror.

Andy fell like that frequently. By the time we were in the third grade, we were quite used to it, really. Oh, it was disconcerting to teachers, but we all knew what to do, and if some young first-year teacher didn't, any one of us would explain in no time. 

It could happen right in the middle of singing; we stood: "Halleluhallelu-hallelu-hallelujah!” then the girls stood: "Praise Ye the Lord!" Up we'd come again: "Hallelu-hallelu-halle ... '', and there he'd be, spilled off his desk, legs split, jerking in the aisle, his arms snapping and twitching.

Even in high school. Typing class. Even in band where he was not a bad trumpeter. Again, at noon in the gym, all the girls watching as they sat around on the bleachers and whispered.

I guess that's what made him so irritable. We never never teased him about it--not even kids could be so crass—but it was there and we knew it. So when we'd get in little arguments about who touched the ball before it went out of bounds, Andy would erupt into violent anger. Someone would tease him about talking to some ugly school girl and he’d come out swinging, those long arms reaching and punching as if he could destroy all of us and this frothing devil within him with little more than his own power.  

(continued tomorrow) 

Old scans--Prayer and Lake Perch

(continued from yesterday--and from 35 years ago.)

But I'm older now, and today l think I know even more. For instance, I think I know that my parents were wrong, in a way, for making me bow my head in a dimly lit tavern. For me, as long as such a practice was awkward or embarrassing or out-of-place, such a practice was mere exhibitionism. It wasn’t prayer at all. 

And what I whispered during those suppers reflected the banality of the exercise: I would chug through a sort of ritual litany of blesses, a childhood memory prayer that included my grandparents – “bless – mamma – and -a daddy – and Judy – and – Gail – and Grandpa – and – Grandma” years after my grandparents had passed on to a place where they had no need of further blessing. Put your head down, quickly get out the words, jerk your head up again—then watch your mother smile. It wasn’t prayer, really.

Today I think I know more about prayer. Those ditties I rifled through over a plate of perch were not really prayers; I wasn't really speaking to God, I was fulfilling an obligation to my parents. Prayer is, of course, nothing more or less than talking with God, and one cannot really sacramentalize prayer with folded hands and bowed heads, as if the occasion were some formal affair of our Sunday-best.

I grew up singing "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire/unuttered or expressed/the motion of a hidden fire/that trembles in the breast." Singing that, I learned that prayer was a spontaneous offering, the fluid, natural communica­tion which flows from creature to Creator. Prayer is not a pose; it's a function-"the Christian's vital breath," the song says.

And today, I'm old enough to learn from no less a heretic than D.H. Lawrence that such natural communica­tion between God and man exists only in a heart attuned to God. Belief, he says (and so have many others), comes on­ly from the Holy Ghost within. So while such public prayers may well have been natural for my parents, they were not for me-not at ten, or fifteen, or twenty.

All of that I think is true. But today I forgive my parents because I know that, in a way, all of that coercion was right-odd as that seems to be. Today my own children are coming to that age when they look at me across the table and wonder whether their father will pray in such an odd place to eat supper.

And the problem is, there's more to worry about when you're a father. All this knowledge one accumulates chasing through life's experiences gets to be a burden at times. While I'm convinced that forcing them, as I was forced, to bow their heads in public will not ensure that real prayer takes place, I am committed to doing whatever I can to ensure that their sweet kid's hearts become attuned to God. I want the Holy Ghost to dwell in those darling little temples. And I know-as I am sure my parents knew that the only way God may come to dwell within them is if they ask Him. And I know--as I am sure my parents knew--that one asks Him to dwell within, only through prayer.

I wonder sometimes how God receives all our prayers, even those shot-from-the-hip-the prayers mustered up as much from a sense of duty as from a real heartfelt desire. I can't help but think they're recorded anyway-even if no sweat or blood certifies the efforts. He is, after all, our Father, and if anyone will understand our silly foibles, surely He will, our great grace-giver. We have, I know, His promise to listen, even when our efforts are soiled by conditioning or coercion.

Sincere desire prompted my father's bowed-head testimony; it was a sincere desire that all of us remember, especially in a bar, whose children we really were. I'm sure God smiles on that kind of devotion.

So I suppose today I too should look over the table with that same furrowed-brow look my father gave me when I was a boy, and use it to convince my children to bow their heads. And silently we'll pray, sitting there rather uncom­fortably. And then we'll eat lake perch. I love lake perch.

Today half the county comes out to their favorite tavern for fish dinner on Friday nights. Years ago, the perch were taken right from the big lake down the road; some fish­lovers ate perch on Fridays to support local industry. Years ago, the county's Roman Catholics had to eat fish on Fridays; some fish-lovers ate perch to fulfill ecclesiastical law. But today, the perch are Canadian, probably flown in; years ago already the Pope freed Roman Catholics from a special Friday diet.

So today there are only two good reasons why all these folks wait in a line along the bar for fried lake perch on Fri­day nights: custom (they've been doing it for years) and pure desire (they love perch). And really, those two reasons are inseparable; they love perch-at least par­tially-because they've loved it for years.

In that way, Friday night perch is like a prayer, I guess. Prayer—real prayer—is a natural function of a heart attuned to God. But atonement comes only by prayer, and one learns to pray by praying. Thus custom builds desire. Thus desire builds custom.

That’s what my father thought, I suppose. And that’s why I’ll carry on that tradition, even into the tavern.

Some old scans--Prayer and Lake Perch

I'm going to be out of town for a week or so, so I thought I'd run a number of really old essays, all of which were hand-written at first, before being typed into an electric typewriter. They don't exist as manuscripts anymore, so I'm scanning them out of a book published more than thirty years ago, when I was, I suppose, something of a different human being, as we all were over time. I certainly recognize a younger self here, someone more sure of himself and his place in God's world. [This one even includes a drawing by Norm Matheis.]

*   ~   *   ~   *   ~   *

I love lake perch, and so do my parents. When I was a boy my family would (very infrequently) venture out to a lakeshore tavern for deep-fried lake perch. Somehow, fresh lake perch tasted great in a tavern, even though the Calvinist culture in which I was reared hinted that something originally sinful breathed and grew in that dimly lit world.

But my parents would chance the moody darkness and the seductive icy tinkling just for a bite of lake perch, with an order of coleslaw in a stout paper cup. Together we'd sit there and pray while the girl in the black stockings waited with a dish full of tartar sauce. In the world, I suppose, but not of it.

And it seemed to me then, a ten-year-old covenant child, ill-at-ease in the foggy and dark city of man, that my bowed head made me even more conspicuous than I already was, even more of an outsider in an elbows-up world of friendly conversation. Just being in a bar was enough of a shock when I was a boy. Praying so noticeably seemed akin to lugging a cross through the swinging doors and hoisting it up on our table, a unneeded demonstration of something we didn't really have to bring up. Even without a bowed head I felt purple.

A few years later at fifteen, the stool sitters seemed to me a more compelling group than they once had appeared--happy, affable, relaxed, some of them leaning up against the bar's thick black padding while holding their tap beers in one hand, all the while laughing and enjoying themselves.

And there we would sit, praying over our perch looking like some Amish family awkwardly strolling through a shopping center. At fifteen it wasn't simply awkward for me to pray in public, it was embarrassing. But then, at fif­teen, one's whole family is something of an embarrassment.

At twenty, everything my parents did was not only embarrassing, but also plain wrong. So I'd smile at the bar girl when she stood there waiting for my father's head to come up, a fancy Pabst tray full of drinks in hand and a bottle of ketchup for our fries m the other. I'd smile as if l knew exactly what she was thinking. Confident of the breadth of my learning, at twenty l was confident such public prayer rose, at most, to the haze of cigarette smoke at the ceiling-only that far.

Such silly piety, l would have said then, flows from either of two purposes, neither of which is sincere motivation. Maybe it's custom: my father has prayed through years of meals, and the habit is so thoroughly fixed within him that he cannot eat without satisfying the urge of ritual.

But custom alone is not motivation enough for prayer, l would have argued. Worse, maybe it's a desire to witness: the outside chance that one of the men bellied up to the bar will note my fathers bowed head and start mending his ways that very evening.

But talking to God so others can see you smacks of the hypocrites in Matthew 6:  "They love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at street corners, that they may be seen by men.” Wrong, wrong, wrong, I would have said, at twenty. Wrong, wrong, l would have said at twenty.

(continued tomorrow)