Love in Granite (i)

In the barest of outlines, their getting together seems, at best, a marriage of convenience.

The husband, Mr. Daniel Freeman, way out on the cusp of the frontier in the 1860s, hunting buffalo and fighting hostiles, wants relief from at least part of the high drama life is still handling him. Throughout the Civil War, he worked as a Northern spy. These days, despite the wild pioneering life, he’s flat out lonely. He’s got land now, a place of his own. What he needs is wife.

So he asks a woman who seems convenient, Agnes S. Suiter, a schoolteacher back in Iowa, a woman he knows her well because she’d been engaged to his brother James, who, most sadly, didn’t return from the Civil War. Early on in their correspondence, she addresses him accordingly as "Brother Dan." but then, once things change subtly, she starts things differently: “Dear Friend Daniel," an only slightly hidden smile.

It's easy to judge their coupling as loveless, too easy in fact. Daniel was a divorcee, and Agnes a widow. Given the trajectory of their lives, both seemed destined to loneliness; both recognized that future, however, and opted for the alternative. And why not? "Better than living alone," each of them might well have thought.

So letters were exchanged. Little more than a year passes, and they marry, bringing an end to their mutual loneliness. Agnes bears Samuel seven children, suggesting their relationship could not have been bereft of passion, although on the mid-19^th century frontier, a passel of kids may not evidence romantic love or even intimacy.

Maybe it's their shared gravestone up the hill at the Homestead National Monument that suggests something cold, something merely convenient. I don’t know why. Daniel could be ornery and by all accounts was no sweetheart, and Agnes Suiter, after all, was a entire generation younger than he was, 17 years. Could those two have loved each other?

And then there’s the strange fact of their meager correspondence doing all the relationship's heavy lifting. Daniel Freeman wrote Agnes S. Suiter first sometime in 1863 (that letter is lost); the two of them were married in her parents’ home in Iowa in February of 1865. There's barely a dozen letters total.

Here's the thing: it didn't take many at all before promises were offered.
_______________________

Tomorrow: the sweet letters of two lonely pioneers becoming "a thing."

Morning Thanks--ART

Thankfully, we have Willa Cather and a score of other writers who left behind impressions of a world that's gone now, a world like this one where there is absolutely nothing but land and sky--and prairie grass. Nary a tree here, except in draws and along the rivers. That there is and was beauty here is unquestioned, but this is not the landscape most people know.

Most people live with trees. Like this--

or this--

or, come October, this--

I bet I've taken a hundred pictures like this cottonwood portrait, a solitary giant basically all alone in the emptiness. They're all we've got really, and that makes them as iconic as a windmill. 

Some people still call these giant cottonwoods weeds; but they're rugged as pioneers. They get beat up terribly by the bully seasons on the plains, but they still manage to inspire, even if the wood is soft and a pain to burn. 

I live in a world that's going to look like this soon. Just not much here.

And I know darn well that we're missing out on a lot because plain old ordinary trees do more about carbon emissions than I could ever hope to. What's more, they're more sure of climate change than at least some of us. Imagine the root system on trees like that old cottonwood; it's huge and it holds on to soil in storms capable of washing all kinds of it away.

See that hawk a mile away, top right hand corner below? Trees are homes too, habitat for all kinds of creatures and critters. There's that too.



According to REI, a 2014 study in Environmental Pollution argued that every last adult tree sucks up 17 metric tons of air pollution, and thereby--listen to this!--"prevented 670,000 cases of respiratory problems like asthma and 850 human deaths."

That's plain nuts. But if it's only half truth, then, seriously, what am I doing in this barren world?



I guess it just happens to be where I live.

Andrew Sullivan, in a recent edition of New York magazine, confessed to having given up his smart phone and put himself in recovery in order to try to start, once again, connecting with people and places, impossible as that seemed. Sullivan claims the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, but distraction. "Perhaps [churches] might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation," he wrote.

And there's this. Some psychologists think there is a kind of redemption in nature--the colors, the textures, the openness, the endless world--all of it pushes us a ways from one self and one's busyness. Those psychologists even have a name for that particular brand of recovery therapy; they call it "ART" or "attention restoration theory."

It works like this. Here's the world I live in, treeless, but winsome in other ways.

What they claims is that actually being out there in natural environments demands so little of our attention our brains get time to rest. Doesn't matter where--in the woods or on the plains.

That's therapy. 

Okay, I'll submit, even though I'm sentenced to a world that can seems treeless. It's still a place where a brain gets time to rest.  This and every morning I'm thankful for the A.R.T. of what's outside.

Saturday Morning Catch--weedy miracles

Look, I'm not complaining. No one is.  Ask any Joe or Jolene right now, and you'll get the same sweet answer--this fall has been to die for. We could be thirty degrees colder, but the temps stay unseasonably gracious, which is a perfect joy. 

Still, most the color is gone from the landscape; and for someone like me, looking for beauty outside right now is a challenge. We'd walked the path around this pond the night before, and I couldn't help notice how the low-riding winter sun did nice things to the lifeless prairie goldenrod. This stuff--

It's string-bean weedy-ness lacks charm or grace really, but when that hunched-down sun hit it right, it wasn't bad. So I wondered what it might look like in a blazing dawn, which is what the next morning turned out to be.

Frost was a surprise--I hadn't figured on frost. There wasn't a ton of it. We can get that sometimes. But Saturday morning, just a sugary delight. 

Frost can be stunning, one of creation's cleanest miracles some mornings; and in that blistering sun it was smilingly glorious. 

Maybe Superman could see this close--I had to use a macro. Call me daft if you will, but that sugar-coat is a wonder, don't you think?

But around me was a largely colorless world where beauty, one might think, was hard to come by.  You just had to look a little harder, which is what Professor Photography teaches you to do when you look closely through the lens.

I could take you out to that little pond this morning, and you'd probably wonder what's to shoot at? But beauty resides, at least in part, in the eye of the beholder, which is really another way of saying you have to look for it. That's why I go.

Then, too, once in a while you get plain lucky. I've got more than my share of milkweed pictures, so I don't hunt 'em down anymore, even though their delicate seediness often lends real character to our barren landscapes. This one was shot-from-the-hip, sort of. I leaned over as far as my crotchety frame would allow and hoped something would come of it. Plain and simple, I got lucky, which, to a Calvinist, means I got blessed..

All this warmth we've been bathing in for so long means there's still emerald summer remnants here and there, like these brave blades.

A shot like this will never make it into a frame, but you can't help admire the pluck, right?

For a decade or more, I've thought of this whole form of recreation the way some lucky guys might think about going fishing. Some Saturday mornings I get skunked; but then some days, even when you're most sure there'll be no action, you come home with stringer full. 

Can't eat this stuff, of course, but that doesn't mean what you caught isn't good for what ails you. 

The psalms begin with the word blessed, a word that requires some interpretation. What does it mean, really, to be blessed? 

Some translations substitute "happy." 

When I come home, open up the files, and find this goldenrod against the bank of a farm pond, it just plain makes me happy, which is to say, blessed. 

Even this ridiculous weedy-ness is a blessing. 

Setting the record straight

As someone who never loved the Clintons but certainly didn't hate them, I wondered where hardcore Hillary haters picked up their ammo. 

You don't have to look far. I typed "Clinton murders" into Google, and in less than a second--Google is proud of such things--turned up various numbers in the "Clinton body count" racket. Somewhere between 33--

 and close to a hundred:

In case you, like me and millions of other Americans were completely out of the loop on all of this, here's a bombshell from late August, a horrible story that broke just in time for the over-stoked campaign season.  

Seriously, you thought the constant drip-drip of Wikileaks told the whole truth? Nosireee. There's bloody more. The brazen horror and demonic arrogance of all this is beyond belief. Read it for yourself--while she was running for President of the United States and Leader of the Free World, Hillary Clinton was involved in the deaths, the murders, of four innocent people--that's right, four--in just the last few months, all of whom would have exposed all of this, would have made brought her and her husband's vicious blood-letting out into the light. Four men since late June.

Shockingly, she orchestrated these things--or her minions did--when she herself seemed to be dying of some horrible health problem that no one would talk about.  

You think I'm kidding? Here's all you need, plus a radio show if you want to stay updated:

If some Hillary supporters try to talk you all of this, download this summary chart and tape it to your refrigerator. Here's all the facts, right there under your thumb.

There's got to be something here. Why didn't I know all of this before the election. I mean, I voted for her, and now I find out she's killed dozens of people in bare-knuckled power grabs. 

Thank goodness President-elect Trump promised to do something, to "lock her up." Remember those chants? Every last rally the whole mob broke into a fever.

Now he's backing off a bit. He says he'll think about that later. Seriously? 

If he doesn't lock her up, does that mean he too is part of the conspiracy? 

He's got Steve Bannon right there with him, so he'll do it. He'll lock her up. He must. Look at the woman's despicable record of evil. She's a serial killer, a mass murder. Donald Trump said he would.

He better.

Right?

Hugh Glass--epic hero

Clear as a friend's heart, 'twas, and seeming cool--
A crystal bowl whence skyey deeps looked up.
So might a god set down his drinking cup
Charged with a distillation of haut skies.
As famished horses, thrusting to the eyes
Parched muzzles, take a long-south water-hole,
Hugh plunged his head into the brimming bowl
as though to share the joy with every sense. 
And lo, the tang of that wide insolence 
Of sky and plain was acrid in the draught!
How ripplingly the lying water laughed!
How like fine sentiment the mirrored sky 
Won credence for a sin of alkali!
So with false friends. 

Pretend this is Lit 101. What on earth is going on here?

Students schooled in regional history might have a leg up. After all, this parched soul who stumbles blessedly on "a crystal bowl whence skyey [is that a word?] deeps looked up" is named Hugh, and he's alone and in very tough shape. If you've not been able to forget the violence of The Revenant, your nightmares might just lead you to believe "Hugh" is the bear-torn hero of that movie. And he is. 

But the rest of the class may need some background.

Hugh Glass has been left for dead. If you saw The Revenant or read the novel by Michael Punke or Lord Grizzily, by Frederick Manfred, you know the brutal story of Hugh Glass, beaver trapper, circa 1830, left for dead after being mauled by a she-bear. 

That helps. Hugh Glass is really, really, really thirsty; but what's with those "parched muzzles. . .thrusting"? What's that about? And what kind of "lying water laughed" anyway?--and "ripplingly"? Seriously? "The sin of alkali" does a ton more than suggest that the crystal bowl so long-sought (I'm picking up the bug) turns out, tragically, to be "acrid in the draught!" It ain't good--that's for sure. But isn't it all a little ridiculous?

"The Song of Hugh Glass" is an ancestor to Manfred's Hugh, as well as Punke's and Leonardo DiCaprio's. What we're reading is the verse of John Neihardt, who was once himself a legend in Nebraska, and left a state monument in Bancroft. Neihardt penned his version of the Hugh Glass saga in an epic poem that sounds for all the world like William Shakespeare or John Milton, the John Milton of Paradise Lost. That's a really long haul from Bancroft.

When Neihardt took Lit 101, what he learned was that true literary stardom, a readership across the ages, needed to be housed in a peculiar style, something called epic poetry. Think Homer--The Iliad and Odyssey. Maybe Beowolf?  So right out here in our world, a world or two away from Aegean fields or Stratford-upon-Avon, John Neihardt figured the Hugh Glass saga was just as great a story as any other--lengthy narrative poems about heroic figures absolutely central to a nation's identity. 

"Why not?" Neihardt must have told himself. What America needs is its own Epic of Gilgamesh or Divine Comedy. Why not start with a wilderness hero like Hugh Glass? 

You got to love the aspiration, don't you? John Neihardt argued for world-class heroism right here on the Plains.

Plunged deeper than the seats of hate and grief,
He gazed about for aught that might deny
Such baseness: saw the non-committal sky,
The prairie apathetic in a shroud,
The bland complacence of a vagrant cloud--
World-wide connivance.

Wow. Amazing. In his deprivation, Glass looks to nature for sweet solace and gets "the prairie apathetic" and a "vagrant cloud." It's "World-wide connivance" because, dang it! no one cares.

Okay, let's be forthright. A full century after Neihardt outfitted Hugh Glass in a Grecian wardrobe, the overblown style seems dead wrong, doesn't it? 

Maybe. But you got to love John Neihardt. What he was doing was something we may well need more of. He was cheerleading. He truly believed our stories ranked with anyone's anywhere in time and space. 

And he was right. Last year, The Revenant was awarded three Oscars. Wasn't the same Hugh Glass story, wasn't set in Siouxland; but Neihardt was without a doubt on to something when he sang "The Song of Hugh Glass," something that began here, a story first written in Siouxland.

Sunday Morning Meds--the Beauty of the Lord

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .” Psalm 90: 17a

One of my grandmother’s older sister, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the early years of the 20^th century. She’d had two children, one of whom died as a child—I don’t know why, and neither does anyone else, now, a century later. Grandma’s sister’s name was Cora Formsma, and her husband was a salesman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One day, without explanation or seeming cause, Cora’s husband, handsome and dynamic, simply walked away and never returned, left his wife and only child.

That child, a daughter, went off to college—unusual for the early years of the century, but then Cora’s father had been a professor. At college she met a bright young man with a distinguished academic future. They fell in love, and when he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan and getting himself financially stable, the two of them planned marriage. Unexpectedly, Cora Formsma’s daughter, soon to be a bride, came down with a strange disease and died soon after, leaving Cora, wife and mother, alone.

I heard that story from an aunt, who remembered being told as a child.

There’s more. Some time later, Cora herself died. And when her relatives looked through her belongings—there were no heirs and no spouse—they found a letter in her desk addressed to the man who had abandoned her, a letter Cora had written, knowing that someday she would die and hoping that maybe something of her would find its way to him. That letter, my aunt told me, explained to him that she loved him so much that, after he left, every night she’d stay awake until she’d heard the wheels of the last Wealthy Street trolley move slowly away into the night.

           

That sound of those steel wheels—a screaming I never heard—stays with me nonetheless, carrying the portrait an wife who buried her only two children, but still waited, every night, for the last trolley, hoping to hear her husband’s footfalls coming up the sidewalk to the door of her empty home.

My aunt told that story for another reason—she wanted to describe my grandmother, a woman I never knew.

Because there is still more. On the walls of my grandmother’s bedroom, she kept a collection of pictures of her family, including an snapshot of her sister, Cora Formsma, and her two small children. When Grandma was dying, and suffering—according to the aunt who told me this—she looked across the room and saw that picture, then asked if someone would please turn it away from her because the sight of her sister brought back the pain and sadness of a story that broke her heart even on her death bed.

Most translations offer verse 17 of Psalm 90 this way—“may the beauty of the Lord shine upon us.” I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what my grandmother wanted, only the beauty of the Lord. Clearly, it’s what Moses wanted, not only for himself, but for his people. This poem, Psalm 90, arises in his parched soul from far too many Aunt Cora stories out there in the desert. The beauty of the Lord is what Grandma wanted, and what Moses wanted—the beauty of the Lord shining all around.

Don’t we all? Some of that beauty is here in the almost forbidding darkness of this great Psalm from the soul of Moses, some of the radiance of God’s divine beauty is here in the poem.

It’s here. Read it for yourself.

Morning Thanks--11/11/16

I suppose "9/11" has already edged out "11/11" among our memorable national numerical icons, but I'm forever imprinted with the latter too. In me at least, the two will forever co-exist because what I remember of 11/11 is what happened at exactly 11:00 a.m., when I was in high school.

That was less than twenty years after the Second World War, and just about everyone's dad had served somewhere overseas back then, including my own father--four years in the South Pacific.

On 11/11 we'd file into the gym and take a seat in the bleachers, purposefully hushed. We knew what was coming, after all there'd been a similar exercise right there for years--how long, I didn't know. A uniformed color guard would march in--several of our fathers, shoulders rifled, uniforms pressed, black boots spit-shined. One would have the flag, and we'd stand, hand over hearts.

Nobody messed around. Nobody yakked or whispered or beat on the kid in front of them. The men in uniform were our fathers or grandfathers, and on their faces spread a sturdy seriousness we'd otherwise never seen. This moment, for them, was the closest they could come to reliving whatever they'd gone through chasing the Huns across Europe or freeing a hundred Pacific islands.

Some preacher would say a few words, and even though I don't remember any particular oration, I could write the speech myself right now; it was all about spirit, the American spirit, about freedom and its horribly high cost, all of that and righteousness and God's good favor.

Then that color guard would march out of the gym, come to an immediate halt outside the front doors, and offer a salute with those rifles, ear-shattering gun shots exploding around that tile-floored gym. What I'll always remember is the rifles, the firing.

My father never marched with those American Legion guys, even on Memorial Day. I wondered why he never said much about the war. It wasn't because he'd seen things he didn't want to remember. His greatest horrors were being away from his family. He'd been aboard a little tugboat whose only job was to pester battleships in and out of South Sea harbors. I don't think he ever saw a Japanese.

Years later my mother told me he didn't participate in the Legion because he thought all that honorary marching was the privilege to those who'd actually lived through the carnage of Anzio, Guadalcanal, or the Battle of the Bulge. As a signalman on a cute little tug, he didn't think of himself as much of a soldier.

I missed Vietnam with a heart malady. I have no brothers, so one in my family spent a day in a southeast Asian jungle. But five of my uncles and aunts were overseas during World War II, and two others, chemists, were part of the Manhattan Project. My family, like almost every other, has a war history. My father-in-law and his gang of grease monkeys followed the Allied front from France to Berlin in the motor pool.

But perhaps the reason why I'll never forget "11/11" is a great uncle, Edgar Hartman, who was killed in France just three months before the original 11/11, when he was hit by a grenade less than a month after arriving. Uncle Edgar was Grandma's brother, her only sibling, and you can bet she never forgot. For generations, as far as I know, great Uncle Edgar was the only family member who gave the supreme sacrifice, in Holland or America. And he was just a kid. Look at him.

At 11:00 in the morning on the 11th day of November that color guard would march into the Oostburg High School gym--11:00 a.m., on the nose, the moment of Armistice. Kids on those bleachers were paying attention, the gravity on those men's faces something other than anything we ever saw or noted. This, we knew, was important.

And it was. And it is.

So this yet another 11/11, I'm thankful for immense sacrifice, my father's, my father-in-law's, my Uncle Edgar's too, and the freedom they and so many others have given me this and every morning I sit here, my fingers over these keys.

Am I close?

What's altogether possible is that it's not a great novel. What makes me believe I can write a novel good enough to be published these days, when traditional publication has become so difficult? What prompts me to believe a story I create is interesting to anyone these days? 

I'm long past prime. No great career awaits me. No one's going to pick up my novel hoping that if this one isn't a winner, the next one will be. There may never be another.

Yesterday, editing this beast of a manuscript, I deleted a sentence that described wet roadside grasses shining in the early morning sun the way the spooled remains of a smashed cassette might. The sentence is gone. After all, who knows what audio tape even looks like anymore? I'm a creature from the black lagoon of yesterday, and there are any number of good reasons no one will take this manuscript.

Besides, technology has changed everything. A man left a voice mail yesterday, wondering again if I'd be interested in publishing with them, self-publishing; he's called several times and all I'd done was typed my name somewhere on their website. Publishing is terribly hard these days because it's become ridiculously easy.

What I'm saying is there may be a thousand reasons why this manuscript of mine will never get published--or, if it does, noticed. It would be wonderfully convenient to be able to blame it's never getting out of my computer on a single dastardly cause, but there may well be tons of reasons, including this one--the writer is a washed-up hack.

But sometimes I wonder if discrimination isn't a part of it. Sometimes I can't help thinking it's so because nobody really cares about a story set out here on the edge of nowhere, a region hemorrhaging population since the 1890s. rural America on the prairie. There's just not all that many of us out here. We're a demographic minority--rural white Midwestern evangelicals. 

So who gives a crap about a story that features people like me? Who wants to spend time in a novel that features no zombies or Amish women or crazed religious murderers, instead simply a novel about ordinary people way down there in fly-over country? Who cares? 

Marilynne Robinson can do it, and does, and has. I just finished Home, a novel that, like her Gideon, never leaves the same tiny Iowa town--and in the fifties. But I know Marilynne Robinson, I've met Marilynne Robinson, I've talked with Marilynne Robinson--and I'm not Marilynne Robinson. 

Still, there are times I've been marginalized. Who cares for us way out here? Certainly not Hollywood, unless it can create caricature, say a religious fanatic with a wood-chipper. We're banal and bigoted and beastly and can't see past the greasy bills of our feed caps.

What chance does this manuscript have in the real world, is something I ask myself. Easy: slim and none.

I'm trying as hard as I can to understand what happened  to all of us this week, specifically from my little acre out here on the edge of the Plains, trying not to drink away my misery because more than anything, what I feel is shame, shame that a banal bigot, a beastly bully is now readying himself to become to leader of the free world because we elected him. I don't understand that, and I'm trying. Help me.

I know people hate Crooked Hillary--I get that. And I understand that she represented a status quo millions disdain or don't trust and even fear. I get that too. I don't share that antipathy, but I get it. The Clintons were never my favorite people.

But why rural America, the rural Midwest, Christian rural Midwesterners to be precise (eighty-some percent of the evangelical vote chose Trump), would elect to the office of President a human being arrogant about his own arrogance, a flesh-pot gambler toting a string of wives and concubines as long as Solomon's, a chiseler who hasn't chipped a dime for schools or roads or military pensions in almost 20 years--why people follow him remains a profound mystery I'd love to understand.

The closest I can come from the depths of my own soul is that sneering anger I feel when I wonder whether anyone would ever read a novel set here, a novel about ordinary people in fly-over country. Sometimes, I'll admit it, I grow resentful because, dang it!--I exist, all right? I'm an old white male who's spent most of almost seventy years claiming to be an evangelical, never less so than now. I am the guy who elected Trump, people like me, people tired and angry about being overlooked.

Is that it? Is that the baggage I can claim? Is that what made thousands chant "Lock her up"? Am I coming close? 

I'm serious. Is that what so many millions feel, so many old evangelical white men from out in the country? 

I just don't know.

The Prophet

Sioux Center, Iowa (CNN)Donald Trump boasted Saturday that support for his presidential campaign would not decline even if he shot someone in the middle of a crowded street. 

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters," Trump said at a campaign rally here.

What the man said right here in Sioux Center, on January 23, 2016, turned out to be pretty much true throughout the campaign.

This morning I'm hoping it doesn't continue to be true throughout his Presidency. 

An election preview

There was nothing in front of me, really, an emptiness that I would not have acknowledged back then, but recognize today. I didn't have a job. In a month, I'd graduate and simply go home having finished the college education my parents couldn't have and therefore considered an incredible opportunity, something I'd lived through without their high regard. Maybe my own fear of the future because a factor that convinced me. I don't know.

I'd just flunked an army physical for a heart condition that still has me taking daily medicines. I was alienated greatly from my own heritage and faith tradition, at odds with my parents' deeply-held political views. I knew--even lived with--Vietnam vets who'd come back deeply scarred psychologically, guys who were a mess. All of that played a role too.

Perhaps I'd begun to oppose the war because so few around me did. Most of the student body descended from hard-rock Republicanism, young men and women armed with a dynamic that valued the bootstraps with which their ancestors, our ancestors--immigrants all--had pulled themselves up and out of having nothing. Hard work was our creed, Nixon our God-ordained leader.

The news came over my radio early one morning in May. Sam Brown was promising a huge anti-war rally that weekend in Washington D.C., urging millions to come to protest U.S. involvement in Vietnam. 

I don't remember making a decision to go, but I went, along with two other Dordt College students, the three of us in a VW bug. It was a life-changing experience.

I remember fault lines in our nation, in my family. I'm a veteran of those wars. I know what it feels like to be at significant odds with those you love. I've seen America around a dinner table split down the middle.

That particular episode of my life comes back to me this morning, how I became a part of a anti-war movement that cut through American life as if it were an ripe melon. I suffered through significant generational conflict, was one of those young people with a father who'd spent years in the South Pacific and had no way of understanding a son who didn't believe in American righteousness.

Back home, streets were burning from racial conflict that ran through the country like a plague. We were a country divided. My father considered Martin Luther King a social agitator, even a communist for undermining American democracy. I recognize my father's views in Home, Marilynne Robinson's second novel about a small town in the fifties, whenever the "old man," Pastor Robert Boughton, tells his prodigal son Jack that "the coloreds" would be far better off if they stopped protests and accepted their role in American culture and class.  

In 1970, I was a kid, and Lord knows I didn't know as much as I thought I did. I came back from that anti-war march on Washington, May 10, 1970, less convinced than I could define righteousness. Still, we were not a united states. 

Sometime after another very contentious election--Bush vs. Gore, in 2000--Newt Gingrich, who would become Speaker of the House in a Republican Revolution he called "Contract with America," was asked about bringing America together. He said this:  

Most Americans do not find themselves actually alienated from their fellow Americans or truly fearful if the other party wins power. Unlike in Bosnia, Northern Ireland or Rwanda, competition for power in the U.S. remains largely a debate between people who can work together once the election is over.

Sunday morning on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Gingrich if he remembered that statement. He did. And then Todd asked the former Speaker, "Do you believe that's the case in January of 2017?"

"No," Gingrich said, as bluntly as that.

On the morning of an election that is far too close to call, it's frightening to think that no matter who wins, half of America is going to watch a person they consider the devil move into the White House and become our leader.

I don't know what's going to happen today, but what's worse is I can not imagine what's going to happen tomorrow. 

Morning Thanks--two old men

Whether or not I like it, I've arrived at the age where it's possible to attend two visitations for the dead within an hour, as I did yesterday, drove right from one to another, might have walked if I'd had more time.

I'd be surprised if the deceased knew each other. They'd spent most their years in different communities, would have had no reason to cross paths, save in the Home where they both came eventually to claim residence. Both men left behind significant legacies of community service, both were deeply and sincerely religious. At their respective funerals today, both families have written "How Great Thou Art" into the liturgy. If you stop what you're doing sometime this morning and listen, you may well hear that old Bev Shea favorite rise from two churches little more than a few blocks apart.

Truth be told, I didn't know either of them well. I was not a long-time friend or even acquaintance. But both men left a mark on me because each of them, at one time or another, told me his life story. I know them only as characters in the yarns they spun about their own lives, but I have no reason to believe their stories were anything less than honest. 

One of them lived a the quintessential rags-to-riches life. relatively speaking. He grew up poor, his Depression-era parents hopscotching across the country, looking for a place in the sun, twelve kids in tow. Kids learn either to adjust to that hardscrabble way of life or they quit it, one way or another, altogether. This son stuck with it and by the sweat of his brow made a real living, eventually did well. Worked hard, loved his kids and family, and, by the grace of God (he'd say), took hold of his bootstraps and got to his feet.  

The other was more privileged in a small-town way. His father was a banker, who found his son a place when his son, a fighter pilot, returned from World War II. He'd gone to college in the late 30s, as few of his era did or could; and he married a war bride in a love story worthy of Hollywood. The two of them moved to Chicago once he was out, decided his father's burg wasn't big enough for them until one day his father made him an offer he couldn't refuse. 

Both of the deceased had arrived at a place in their lives where even they would admit it was time to go. There were only a few tears at either visitation, which doesn't mean there haven't been any since both of them died. Or will be today at two funerals.

I hadn't spent much time with either of them, hadn't worked with or for them either. We weren't related in any sense at all, other than by our mutual faith. At those visitations, I didn't hug family members, didn't even speak to all of them, didn't know most of them.

But I did stand there in front of both bodies for a while, each of them handsomely laid out, white shirt and ties, in his own velvety coffin, and I couldn't help thinking once again how perfectly still the dead really are. No matter how relieved the sorrowing might be when the end finally arrives, death doesn't look good on anyone. Both seemed so much alone. 

Last night the scripture was drawn from the Believer's Hall of Fame, Hebrews 11, where the first real hero is humanity's first murder victim--Abel, brother of the forever-marked Cain.

"By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did," Paul says. "By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings." And then this line which went over well the evening after two prolonged moments of silence that afternoon. "And by faith Abel still speaks, even though he is dead."

I found that comforting.

So today, if you're in the neighborhood, sometime this morning just drop what you're doing and listen. Better yet, sing. 

This morning I'm thankful for two old men who, right now, may well be smiling and telling each other their stories.

Sunday Morning Meds--A goodly heritage

“May your deeds be shown to your servants, 

your splendor to their children.”

Psalm 90:16

Great-Grandpa Hemkes must have been the quintessential absent-minded professor. Once, before he came to America, he was so preoccupied with his theological meanderings that he nearly skated beyond the canals and straight out into the unfrozen North Sea, had to be restrained by fellow skaters concerned for his safety. His obituary suggests that, as a professor of theology, he was legendarily slack; but people considered him a grand storyteller. He lived to be 82, died of the diabetes he fought most of his life.

Strangely enough, I find all of that relevant.

His daughter, my Grandma Schaap, was an angel—and that reference of her character comes from her daughter-in-law. One characteristic of my father’s family is an almost unmanly sweetness, even in the men, who seem to have arrived a bit short on testosterone. Such gentleness might have come from her, Grandma Schaap, who was never particularly healthy. But then she had ten kids--small wonder.

Great-Grandpa Schaap (that's him and his wife Neeltje up top) tried to farm like millions of other European immigrants in of his era, even though back home in the Netherlands he’d sailed the high seas. But, there was free land in South Dakota, where he lasted just two years and, from then on, determined he wasn't fit to master the plow. He'd left Holland because the North Sea island where he lived didn’t have a church that quite met his standards.

My ancestors on both sides of my family were very religious folk, which (when one considers the letters coming out of this computer right now) is a fact worth noting. I hail from a distinguished ancestral legacy of bedrock Christian belief in the Calvinist tradition. And here I am, meditating on the Psalm 90.

Still, I’m sure some of those folks would wince when they’d read these pages. They carried convictions I don’t have, set stiff boundaries on Sabbath behavior, and likely would have considered moving-picture shows the lusty work of Satan. They never danced, and if they played cards at all, it was likely Rook. They meted out their love for the Lord almost militarily, created cloistered communities with quite unsparing codes of righteousness.

I am their child in many, many ways. I have no doubt at all that part of the reason I’m writing these words is attributable to them. They are the source of the spiritual predilection in me—biological and/or behavioral. They are my heritage.

But I am not my father, just as my son is not his. There's not a clone in your lineage or mine.

Still, my son has it too, my own son—this predilection to believe. He has, just as I have, a goodly heritage, sometimes more than little uptight. And I want him to know that family history and own that heritage, to confess his faith in Jesus Christ. I want him to believe, as they, I’m sure, wanted me to, even if they’d immigrated to glory long before I was born—or him.

I know the impulse of this line from Psalm 90: “May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children.” Every Christian does and has. We want those we love to know the Lord. It’s just that simple.

Befuddled

At 97 years old, he is, after a fashion, frozen in time. What he loves most, or so it seems to his son-in-law, is getting out of the Home and tooling through northwest Iowa countryside blessedly familiar to him. He loves remembering the stages of maturing corn and beans, seeing the harvest in action, reviewing what was, for him, his life.

These days he shakes his head at mammoth farm implements rerouting traffic as they lumber from field to field. Today, the only home for his brand of farming in museums. Corn and beans look taller maybe, but familiar; everything else is more than a little confusing. "Things sure have changed," he'll tell me every ten minutes or so as we drive through the country.

For the most part, he's lost the use of television. He watches only one station and nothing more than the news. Most television programming is beyond him these days--he doesn't catch on, and his hearing is awful. Then again, no one in Hollywood makes things for his demographic. He turns his flat-screen on and off on the side, where buttons are so well hidden they're nearly invisible. No matter. It's easier for him that way than having to fool with that blasted remote.

The Weather Channel was fascinating during Hurricane Matthew, and I got to thinking that maybe his life would be more interesting if he could watch the TWC. Shouldn't be that difficult, really, just a matter of his knowing the channel number. I could write it down in big bold numbers on a cardboard sheet so he'd know how to navigate over there. "And the animal channel," I told him. "And maybe the oldies--there's a whole network of oldies like I Love Lucy."

He wasn't buying. He wondered if he went to those channels whether he could ever find "six" back, his sole medium for news.

"No problem." I said.

Well, it was. The remote needed batteries, and operated so spastically that I would have tossed it and turned the set on manually myself. He'd long ago lost the card that indicated where he'd find TWC on his cable system, so I started hunting, and he started getting nervous.

"Can I get back again? Can I find the news yet?" he said. Several times he interrupted like that, more often than I care to admit or remember.

Once upon a time television offered only three choices--ABC, NBC, and CBS. That's what he remembers. Now there are hundreds.

I gave up, but when I left I made it clear that nothing had changed. All he had to do was put his finger on that little stop on the side of the flat-screen and the news would be there when it was supposed to be when he got back from supper.

Sometimes these days I feel like he does, practically powerless to monitor, even control, the rushing flood of information that streams into my life. Sometimes I tell myself I don't need 200 channels. Truth be told, I wouldn't mind going back to three networks and a whole lot less fireworks.

Zeynep Tufekci (seriously, that's the spelling), an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill maintains that the kind of overload my father-in-law and I feel sometimes these days is its own kind of censorship.

Right now, there is too much information. In the 21st century, censorship doesn't work by withholding information. Censorship now works by flooding with information, by causing distraction, by causing confusion, by creating doubts and just this question mark and shadow so that you really can't figure out what's going on.

There's more. "And to me, this is almost like the opposite of whistleblowing. This is whistle-drowning in confusion and distraction." 

One of the reasons for my befuddlement (in addition to age) is the sheer number of "October surprises." There were dozens, so many that yesterday's simply got forgotten. Thousands upon thousands of Wikileaks, Prof. Tufekci says, don't make our lives easier, they prompt insanity. Endless accusations about Donald Trump end up making us stupified.

What we need, she says, is to trust some filtering agency, someone to do our managing for us, someone to tell us what's important and what's not. 

And who will appoint that manager? I wondere.  Will it be Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? 

I'm about to put our remote in the drawer and turn on the flat screen down here, if I could only figure out how to do that.