1870 visions of the beauty underfoot--Charley Dyke

 

The History of Sioux County, a wonderful storybook, was written by one of Sioux County’s own pioneer journalists, Charles L. Dyke, way back in 1940. Dyke’s history is rich, not only because he knew a good story when he saw one, but also because he came here himself in a covered wagon, with his parents, in the days of sod huts.

In this passage from his History, Charles Dyke describes what the first white folks saw when they came up to untouched Sioux County prairie, land open forever to the horizon.

[Can't help but notice that Mr. Dyke wasn't altogether too far from where I'm sitting right now.]

“On their right lay the rich Floyd River bottom with the glistening river winding through the trees and willows. To the north as far as the eye could reach, where the prairie seemed to meet the sky, lay the most beautiful and fertile land in its primeval state that mortal man had ever seen. And this beautiful land which they so much admired was theirs for the asking, provided no others asked for it before they did. It excited them not a little.

“It was in the middle of June, the month of brides and roses, and no bride was ever more beautifully arrayed than Virgin Prairie Sioux was, when she was wooed by the settlers. The lush grass glistened and reflected the sunlight and was sprinkled with millions upon millions of flowers. Roses were everywhere; they hung in garlands along the river banks and crowned the badger-mounds with flaming red, pinks and whites. The sawgrass, tall and vividly green in the sloughs, was banked with masses of white anemones, pink phlox and yellow buttercups. In the low places along the river the violets formed a solid blue, and their delicious perfume arose to heaven. In other low places the pink oxalis thickly covered the ground. The uplands were splotched and spangled with clumps of fire and tiger lilies, larkspurs, coreopsis, daisies, and hundreds of others of almost every known shade, tinge and color.

“The prairie swarmed with old and young prairie chickens, quails, killdeer, larks, plovers, curlews, native sparrows, song sparrows, cranes and many others and the trees along the river were musical with nesting song birds. The sloughs were alive with ducks of different kinds and jingled with the song of the bobolink. Yellow-headed blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and red wing blackbirds swung and ukelelied on the reeds. A brilliant sun made everything shimmer and glimmer and glisten.

“The wagon jogged slowly on, and like Moses of old viewing the promised land from the heights of Pisgah, they gazed and gazed and said nothing, for they were under a spell of strange emotions. Then one of them broke this spell by reverently intoning the paraphrased lines of an old hymn:

“It is the promised land,
Fresh from the Maker’s hand;
It is indeed an earthly paradise.”

And the others responded with “Amen! Amen! Amen!’”

____________________

Charles Dyke was raised in the tradition of Dutch Calvinism, as were most of those he remembers well; but he was not always so pious as he seems in the passage you just read; it’s the gorgeous untouched prairie that kindles his reverence.

The prophet in me 17 years ago

Just found this, this morning. It's 17 years old, almost prophetic, except for me talking too much. I do much less of it, but still spill over too frequently. Otherwise, it's downright prescient. 

We were young, just parents, and he was our landlord--a brilliant mind, I'm quite sure. He'd drop by and talk. And talk. And talk. And talk. He never stopped. He was a theologian, a retired preacher. We used to roll our eyes when finally he'd pick up his hat.

I remember once, back then, when our own pastor stopped by for an annual visit the Dutch sometimes still refer to as huis bezoek. He was with an elder, a colleague of mine. That night, that preacher talked and talked and talked and talked--a full hour. I don't know that anyone else even said a word. The next day that colleague told me he was deeply impressed with the preacher because even though the man talked all night, he was marvelously perceptive about the people with whom he'd visited. I thought my colleague--a sweet, sweet man--was utterly daft on thata one.

Thirty years ago, I told myself I was never going to become an old preacher. I wouldn't let myself go on and on. And here I am, on a blog.

It's not just preachers--it's profs too. We're susceptible to perpetual yapping, accustomed as we are to the sound of our own voices. What's more, we're also accustomed to people listening, students or parishioners. We've spent lifetimes holding forth.

Yesterday morning was sheer disaster--I won't count the ways. The low point happened just outside my door, when I was running late and my unopened school bag slipped from my shoulder, dumping its contents into the powdery snow over the driveway in the pitch darkness of early, early morning. I couldn't even see what had to be picked up.

I think the Lord allows a smidgeon of vulgarity every fortnight or so, so I registered my allotment, then took off my gloves and retrieved all that snowy stuff, jammed it back in the bag, and walked off. It was, maybe, 6:30, inky dark.

Against the streetlights, it was clear to me that the morning that had been a disaster in the basement--class preps, computer snafus--was going to be a gem outside. Through the amber glow of streetlights, the hoarfrost on the trees was already beginning to appear. Lots of people hate cold weather, with good reason; but when the Lord almighty outfits naked trees in perfect white gloves, if you forget the temperature you might just think you're in heaven. Even in the darkness, the maples and lindens--utterly shorn of leaves--were noiselessly clapping their hands.

And I told myself the only place I'd like to be right now is anywhere other than where I'm going, somewhere west, somewhere along the Missouri River, somewhere with my camera, trying to capture at least something of what was certainly going to be a drop-dead gorgeous morning. Maybe up north at some frozen Minnesota lake. That'd be fine too.

That's what I was thinking when I was walking to school, still brushing off snow. I want to be gone. I want to be away. I want to be by myself somewhere west or north, alone in all this glory. I don't want to face students that'll show up in an hour. I don't want to talk about passive verbs or--God forbid!--wordiness. I just want to leave. I want to be by myself.

I don't want to hear the sound of my own voice. I want to high-tail it, like Huck.

Instead, I walked to school, where I talked some more, like an old preacher.

Maybe that's why the fantasy haunts me again this morning, even without the provocation, even as the words appear mysteriously from the white silence on the screen before me.

Last night, with a gaggle of students, we read Rilke, some beautiful devotional poems that felt like intimate whispers to God. They're not meant to be read in a group. I'd take Rilke along, I promise. I don't want to talk. I want to learn.

Someplace west, I want the silence to teach me.

L and C and me - iv

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy, and two of them--using sticks long as lodge poles to pole the beast up, or pulling the boat and pirogues up river with ropes, the men marching along the river's edge--had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. Going upstream was a behemoth task. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that canon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absence, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom!--a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown to day." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch canon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

The Hottest GenZ gadget is an old camera--NYTimes

Took this picture on Saturday, late afternoon, at Broken Kettle Grassland, maybe the most beautiful spot in the neighborhood, right now an abundance of big snowy marshmallows on the northernmost edge of the Loess Hills.

I love the picture. It's elegant lines and contrasting late-afternoon lighting sweep your eyes along the edges of nothing more than an ordinary snow drift just off the road. In the shadowy light, the moment I saw it I knew it probably offered as much sheer beauty as anything I was going to find right then--even the buffalo out there. I got out of the truck, stepped around the cab, took out my phone, and this is what I took home. I--me!--had so little to do with the picture that I hope you don't mind my saying that it's really beautiful.

And I took this too.

I haven't toyed with this shot at all, but I could likely adjust the color enough to bring it to the deeper blue of the shot up top. Likewise, I could crop it a bit so the drift makes up the same proportion of the picture. No problem.

That having been said, there just ain't a whole lot of difference--the top shot, from my phone; this one comes from a camera and lens whose original cost I would feign attempt to tally and admit.

Friend of mine sent me a note recently, almost a lament. Told me he'd been to Glacier National Park and basically used his phone for pictures, left his Nikon at home, didn't even bring it with, and the pictures--well, look for yourself. Which is sharpest--which is best? I don't know.

When I was a kid, our basement was full of photography stuff--developers and fixers, a homemade enlarger, lots of paper. I've been taking pictures ever since I was 13. I bought my first real camera--an SLR--in 1976, a better one right before a trip to South Africa, a couple of expensive point-and-shoots after that, and then, finally, I stepped into the DSLR world maybe ten years ago or so.

Today, honestly, the best I can do with the Olympus DSLR I own and love, I can do with a $400 phone (for the record, a Google 7).

And now--get this!--according to Sunday's NY Times, kids are begging for their parents' old cameras. “We’re so used to our phones,” said just such a kid, a college freshman. “When you have something else to shoot on, it’s more exciting.”

Oh, my word. Oh, my camera.

I suppose this return to fuzziness is a variant strain of the attraction of antiques. Maybe Gen Zs will rekindle that market too, at just about the time we're selling our furniture and moving off to the Home. Anyway, these hip Gen Z's are posting their blurry photos on line, on social media, anxious to show off the fuzziness or burned- out faces. Third-rate photos are very cool, I guess, but then there's no accounting for taste.

It's enough to make an old man's head spin. What I really need to find is that old homemade enlarger and the pans I used for developer and fixer. Who knows what kind of price that old thing might bring? Who knows how far back this fad'll take us?

I don't get it really, but then there's a ton I don't get these days.

But allow me to make an announcement. On the shelf right here behind me, I've got a couple old fart cameras I'll be glad to sell. Let me know what you're paying.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“You turn men back to dust, saying, ‘Return to dust, O sons of men.’”

I received a note, years ago now, from a couple who claimed they wanted my help. She was dying of ovarian cancer. She’d kept a journal throughout her life but had continued to write during her affliction, thinking about issues she was facing immediately, issues of life and death. She and her husband wondered whether I might help her—and them—bring something together in book form. Lots of people appreciated her e-mail reflections, they said; many urged her to collect them. “They should all be in a book,” people told them.

The cancer was terminal. Since the verdict had been handed down, the two of them—with a little help from a financial benefactor—had decided to do their own “make-a-wish” adventure and travel to places they’d always dreamed about. They’d had four kids—two of them were in college, all of them in their late teens and early twenties. Extensive travel hadn’t been an option earlier in their lives. They’d chosen to live frugally, in a fashion they would have called, themselves, “stewardly.”

But Sharon was dying, and there were things she wanted badly to see, places she’d always wanted to go. So for a year or so they’d lived almost nomadically, and she’d kept that journal, pages and pages long.

Would you help us? they said. Her reflections would make a good book.

I get dozens and dozens of such requests, and it’s always painful to have to tell people that I can’t—or won’t help. I could have spent every moment of my writing life helping people with their own great stories or writing those stories myself. I could have done that and never once seen a publication or made a buck. Everyone has a story—everyone. But most of us don’t care to read everyone else’s.

But something about this story seemed especially compelling, so I told them I’d like to meet them and have a look. I did, and I took the job on. That was six years ago, and finally, maybe a month or two from now, the book will be published.

That it’s taken a long, long time is attributable, in a way, to the fact that the project is—and has been from the very first scribbling—a labor of love. I don’t want to appear angelic, but it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a dime on the book. Nor will they.

And that’s understatement. Sharon is gone, of course. Three years ago already, her cancer took her. The book includes her final jottings, as well as the detailed plans she’d made for her own funeral. Sharon’s earthly musing is history.

Not long later, while we were on vacation, another e-mail note appeared in my in-box, a note I didn’t read until yesterday. Sharon’s husband, Dennis, had cancer himself—I knew that. I didn’t know how bad. Yesterday’s e-mail made clear that his condition is terminal. It’s lung cancer, a killer. He never smoked in his life.

An old friend of mine once told me her preacher/father loved to do funerals because he felt he never held people’s attention so fully as he could when he read Psalm 90 with a coffin—open or closed—set conspicuously in front of the sanctuary.

“Dust to dust the mortal dies,” the old song says. Not just Sharon, but now, shockingly, Dennis too—and, lest we forget, you and me. What is inescapable about Psalm 90 is inescapable about life: it ends, for all of us. That’s everyone’s story.

L and C and me - iii

 

Was it arrogant of them to name things like rivers and creeks and mountain meadows? Isn't it really silly to call the operation "the Corps of Discovery," as if, like Columbus, they were "discovering" anything? What right did they have to lay a claim on land that wasn't theirs? From the very top of the image above, top and center, you'll see reference to the Corps the map-maker got right, even if he got the spelling wrong. They named the river "Independence Creek." Who cares anyway--that it was christened such by "Louis" and Clark? Think anybody who lives along Independence Creek today is angry about it?--wishes it were Delmar Smith's Creek or whatever? Doubtful.

But naming things is what they did. Very few white men had ever been up the Missouri from St. Louis, and most of those who had been were French Canadians insignificant numbers, trappers and mountain men who tended to get along quite well with the Indiginous, even took a wife or two or three and learned the language.

Lewis and Clark were different. When they reached that big bend in the river up there, they couldn't help but notice a tributary, 40 yards wide or so, Clark said, and then they--arrogantly--named it as if previous to their arrival at that point in time or space no one ever seen it. 

You can call that arrogance, but a better name is "privilege," specifically "white privilege." And if you think I'm getting petty about all of that, my guess is that, like me, you're white too. In the history of the region, we were the only tribe that immediately determined we "owned" the place, owned it so fully that we determined names, like the Floyd, frozen now, but still there a couple of hundred yards outside my window.

Still, I love their gushing. I really do. Right about here, in the neighborhood of Atchison, Kansas, Clark couldn't say enough about the place: " we camped in the plans one of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River." I can't help thinking that people of the region where I live tend to look past the rich beauty of our particular world--"it's a good place for soybeans, eh?" When people gush like the Corps did in their journals, I beam.

A bit later he starts in again:

The Plains of this countrey are covered with a Leek Green Grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most norushing hay—interspersed with Cops [copses] of trees, Spreding their lofty branchs over Pools Springs or Brooks of fine water. Groops of Shrubs covered with the most delicious froot is to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to butify the Senery by the variety of flours delicately and highly flavered, raised above the Grass, which Strikes & profumes the Sensation, and amuses the mind.

So much beauty, Clark says, has a strange effect, it "throws it into Conjecterng the cause of So magnificent a Senerey [several words illegible, crossed out] in a Country thus Situated."

And then, watch for it, racism, white privilege. It is unimaginable for William Clark to observe such breathtaking beauty and not wonder at the injustice of it all such beauty in a land so "far removed from the Sivilised world to be enjoyed by nothing but the Buffalo Elk Deer & Bear in which it abounds & Savage Indians."

I adore their adoration for the beauty of God's creation here along the Missouri River, but I can't be blind to the arrogance that underlies it. Brilliant, daring men as adept with a rifle as they were with their quills, held strangely feeble regard for men and women other than themselves: "so much beauty able to be beheld only by animals and savages--how on earth can that be?

I'd like to think I can admire this enterprise and still see it generated by privilege and what the Euro-Americans Lewis and Clark couldn't help but imagine would be there soon. In 1804 there was no one at the confluence of Independence Creek and the Missouri--none, zero. Fifty years later, the place would be jumping, six thousand people, and there would be hundreds of other towns and villages. Soo enough, the swarm would be forming under the template of "Manifest Destiny." We'll see what we can learn.

Miss Emily down the Floyd

Generally speaking, reading through the Emily Dickinson portfolio of poems is no picnic. Evasive, often deliberately ambiguous, her lines are rarely smooth; they delight in the unexpected, and her punctuation is as eccentric as she was--and still is. 

She is perfectly capable of taking on anything and everything, including God, maybe especially the God her somber father worshipped as a thoroughbred, 19th-century American Calvinist. The accusations aren't boldly stated in "There is a Certain Slat of Light," but sit with the poem for a while and her accusations emerge--that "certain slant of light/winter afternoons" is but a reminder of the despair that God himself brings upon us. And yes, you read that right. 

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –  [think Bach, think "Tocotta and Fugue"]

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

If "Heavenly Hurt" isn't an indictment, it certainly is a complaint. 

None may teach it – Any – [okay, but she's certainly narrowing her options]
'Tis the Seal Despair – [ah, despair--that's what she's talking about]
An imperial affliction  ["imperial"?]
Sent us of the Air –[this "heft" is all around]

When it comes, the Landscape listens – 
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Told you it was no picnic. 

But last week's walk along the river made me tell Ms. Emily that she was dead wrong. Look for yourself.

In mid-winter, the sun rides so low in the sky that it stretches hefty shadows down the river bed. It seems to me that this winter solstice phenom is what she's talking about; this is that "certain slant of light," and it's here every last winter day of every last winter because the earth has this curious habit of circling the sun in the same way every year since Creation. 

What I'm saying is that Dickinson, rest her soul, reads nature in this poem in a way that is instructive, thoughtful, mysterious, and even theological, but it's her reading, uniquely hers. When I walked down the river last week, I didn't see death. It was freaky cold and blindingly bright, but, doggone it, the world's slanting shadows were gorgeous. Check these out, a thousand "slants of light" right there on the unsullied river's path.

None of that refutes Dickinson. She takes these slants of light and turns them into a roundtable discussion of despair--or depression--and determines to hang the whole thing at least mostly on God. Let's not forget that King David did that too, often enough. In her case, in her life, in her neighborhood, maybe she wasn't wrong--I don't know that.

But I'm saying that my sojourn down the Floyd River made me something of an infidel to her righteous determinations. I couldn't help thinking that January's long-stretched shadows, not once, in a couple hours' hike, weighed heavily on me. I thought they were beautiful. Still do.

Don't get me wrong. She may be no picnic, but she's worth reading, always worth considering, even in the cold, on ice.

Wandering

The pastor and his missus, the Nobles, are worried, but not scared. They're about to be visited by members of the church council, and they're concerned because several of the friendliest old shoulders have turned cold. A few parishioners they considered friends--or at least friendly--have made themselves notable by their absences. Something is in the air. They feel it, and they're worried.

Mrs. Noble registers something of that fear, but her husband lovingly dissuades her, or tries. He's done nothing wrong; they both know it. But the two of them have been in the ministry for a long time, and some corners of his tenure at this church--his last, they've decided--are darker than they'd should be.

Mrs. Noble will be having an operation (we're not told her medical problem), but her apprehensiveness rises from her determination that she doesn't have the heart to do the whole thing over again--go to yet another town, another manse, another crowd of congregants, another garden, another redone bedroom--she has absolutely no desire to do all of that again for the four-hundredth time. 

She doesn't have to come right out and tell her husband because he knows darn well how and what she fears and feels.

The council arrives--all men, of course--and they take places, on edge, in the parsonage sitting room. She greets them, then retreats to the kitchen. They begin with the matter of church remodeling, which they conveniently table. When she begins to believe that things are not going to turn out as she feared, she reenters the front room to serve a dish of pecans.

That's when it gets ugly. Accusations--of a sexual nature!--are made against Mr. Noble. They're phony, of course, but the faction they were afraid of already before the meeting has done the dirty work: "for the good of the church," and so forth. It ends as badly as you could have suspected. 

Do such things happen? Of course, innumerable times in the last year, I'm sure; but reading Ruth Suckow's "Wanderers" is not going to make your day shine. 

I read it Monday, recorded it, which means, really, interpreted it. I've been recording Ruth Suckow stories for some time now, a little project encouraged along by a society that tries to keep Ruth Suckow from disappearing from the reading public's eyes. When I read her stories aloud, I can't help but fall into the characters--and when that happens, I can't help but "feel" the story. "Wanderers" is depressing; its stubborn insistence on their unjust and sad expulsion from the church they'd tried to serve "for the Kingdom" is suggested from the opening paragraph--and there's no deviation. It ends even worse than the Nobles suspected, and they're so innocent, so, well, Christian.

Last night I heard summaries of two sad stories, one of them, in outline at least, not a whole lot different from "Wanderers," a young pastor suddenly released from a church he came to serve. I met him only once, but his wife was a precious student, very talented, full of personality and charm, a young woman who worked for me, someone I saw every day for a year or more. I hate to feel any bit of the pain she must feel.

And then there's a couple--he's an administrator in a Christian school. I knew them because I knew the places where they grew up, even knew their families. The story is, he walked out of their marriage, a shock to his wife. She's a Facebook friend, and it just seemed to me that his absence from all her posts was striking. 

Once upon a time they were all in my class. It's not like they're your own children. I'd be sleepless if it was. But it hurts in the same places, just some lesser equivalent. 

I think "Wanderers" is very well-done, but it's doggedly depressing. Things don't go well for the Nobles, and they don't deserve the shocking expulsion from their own backyard garden. 

When I finished reading it, I couldn't help but think that it was like so much of the literature I assigned during my almost forty years in the classroom, stories and poems and plays and essays I wanted my students to read--forced them to read--because they were well-done. Often enough, those stories were depressing too, in part, I suppose, because writers--like me--find a rich vein of what's most decidedly human in our proximity to calamity, or, in some cases, the calamity we bring to ourselves on our own. 

Then again, maybe a diet of difficult imaginative literature may not have been a bad thing. Light in the darkness distinguishes itself as light only when there is some actual darkness. 

I'd like to think that those students of mine who are suffering right now are suffering some bit less because they've read about suffering, about human frailty. Maybe teaching the darkness is itself a possible means to more clearly see the light.

I hope so. For each of their sakes, I hope so.

____________________

If you would like to hear the recording of Ruth Suckow's "Wanderers," let me know and I'll send it.

Me and L and C - ii

Sunday, these six deer crossed the land behind our house, going west toward the woods along the river. They're running here, but they took their good natured time, as if they knew it was the Sabbath. That they only loped along and sometimes even stood still was unusual, and right neighborly of them. 

Not long after, four of them crossed the field going back east, then up and over the road into the trees on the other side. We see deer around here far more often in the winter--the corn is gone and the world is white with snow. We see them more often because they're visible more often, not necessarily because, suddenly, there's more.

Truth be told, for us at least they're always a thrill. They'd be less so, I'm sure, if they decided to feast in our garden come July and August, but they rarely come that close. Every time we get new snow I march out into our acre to see if there's anything other than rabbit tracks. Haven't seen any at all these year, and we've had more than our share of snow. 

These prints, made by what my nephews, deer hunters all, might call a "nice buck," are from the woods beside the river, where that bunch up top were headed. 

Once long ago, we stayed overnight at a hunting lodge along the Missouri River, just south of Chamberlain, SD,--Thunderstick, I think the name was. I got up early, in great part because, if you ask me (and I know you didn't) the Missouri River valley can be--and is, around Chamberlain--among the most beautiful places on the continent. I know, I know--I'll get a fight a minute for that kind of claim, but there's no accounting for taste.

I got up early and sat up on the top of a hill to greet the dawn. There were deer, dozens of them in the wide-open, grassy spaces above the river, and they put on a show. Once or twice a day, our cat decides to touch every corner of the house in a fanatic race that assures him he's not getting as old as he is. 

That morning south of Chamberlain, I saw a dozen deer doing what appeared to be the same thing, racing up and down those grassy hills as if making sure every last muscle in their bodies was fine-tuned. Had I been closer, I would have seen them smile. I couldn't help humming "Home on the Range" out there, not because that's where I was, but because I had been right there where "the deer and the antelope play." I'd never seen deer play, but that's what they were doing. 

On June 30, 1804, Lewis and Clark and company made ten miles up river in 96-degree heat, putting ashore finally in the vicinity of what is today Walcott, Kansas. The deer, Clark reported, employing a bit of hyperbole maybe, were thick as hogs on a farm. They took nine. Everyone ate well.

 We don't get anywhere near that, even on an exceptional day like last Sunday. Sometimes people say here that the population of white-tailed deer is vastly greater than it was when the first Euros set foot on the state land. Why? Guess. Corn. 

I don't know that that's true, but I like the game-y comparison, and it's somehow almost Edenic to think about deer thick as hogs on a farm, and no cars, only hungry men to take 'em. I'm guessing around the fires there was a good deal of smiling that late June day. 

L and C and me--a Missouri River trip - i

 

at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers

Of course, back then, there was no KC out there on the misty horizon.

In case you're wondering, that's Lewis and Clark there at the end of the sidewalk. Not them, of course--photography was hardly that developed in 1804; but it's some kind of sculpted representation standing at a place where the two of them and their corps stayed for four days and nights at the advent of their trip up the Missouri.

That's old Muddy to their left, and the Kansas River to their right. They'd been on the Missouri (its waters are heavier than the Kansas, they reported) since leaving the fur traders in a little French village named St. Louis. But now, in a few days, they'd be turning pretty much straight north, heading up into what they knew--and feared, in a way--was Indian country. They'd follow the Missouri, the longest river on the continent--and no, they didn't know that. 

Their number one objective was to find a waterway that would get them all the way to the other side of the continent, a voyage very few American settlers had ever done and most hadn't even tried to imagine. President Jefferson wanted to know what was all out there in the vast territory he'd just picked up  from the French at a bargain basement price (15 million).

The whole bunch was called the Corps of Discovery for good reason because discovery was their directive: cover a goodly chunk of the 824 thousand square miles of that real estate purchase, bring back as comprehensive a report as you can of the flora and fauna, and while you're out there, introduce yourselves and the US to the savages (they weren't particularly pc), tell them to stop fighting with each other and work for their Great Father in Washington. That's about it--well, and stay alive to bring it all back.

To accomplish that, L and C recruited 45 crew, all of them lean and young and sparking for real adventure. Two of them, right here, got loaded on one of those four nights at the confluence of the two great rivers. A chap named John Collins, assigned to guard duty, tapped into the Corp's reserves (you couldn't run an army without fuel--without grog) when he knew darn well he wan't supposed to. He did anyway, got himself all loopy and convinced another corpsman, Hugh Hall, to join in the reverie, which young Hugh did. 

The next day already, right here, there followed a court-martial (the Corp was a military unit). Collins, who'd started the mess, got himself 100 lashes with a cat'o'nine tails, while drinking-buddy Hall got half that, given that Hall got himself drawn in and didn't himself tap the keg. 

For the record, a cat 'o nine tails looked something like this (and yes, that is a mousepad, not mine, but then there's no accounting to taste). Couldn't have been a pleasurable experience. Might well have made the next day's rowing more than a little difficult.

A big public flogging might seem a little heavy for tipping the keg for a little extra, but most historians would say that the punishment was pretty much standard fare. It fit the crime and was by no means out of the ordinary. The punishment was brazenly public too, to up the ante a bit on the original directive: Don't touch the booze for anything more than your daily "grog," (about four ounces) of whiskey.

Lesson learned, I guess, because such tomfoolery didn't happen again--or, if it did, L an C simply didn't record it for posterity. All of that happened here, while the Corps was camped at the mouth of the Kansas River.  

It's hard not to notice KC if, today, you stand right there where they must have 219 years ago, but it's still somehow thrilling to stop by where the Kansas meets the Missouri, right at the spot where they must have and imagine what it might have been like to stand there wondering what (literally) "on earth" they were going to discover once they started up river. None of them had any idea and they knew it. 

Honestly, it must have been daunting, even humbling, which is to say thrilling, I suppose, just to stand there. For some of us, still is. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Everlasting to everlasting

Before the mountains were born 

or you brought forth the earth and the world, 

from everlasting to everlasting you are God. Psalm 90:2

What I’ll not forget about our visit to Hot Springs, SD, years and years ago, was my son’s deep fascination with the ongoing work of grad students who were, even as we visited, busily brushing away the dust from the massive pile of skeletons unearthed in a single murderous sinkhole.  He was transfixed, not only at the horror show of bones and skeletal remains, but also at the archeologists’ careful work.  This wasn’t just some Black Hills tourist attraction.  People were getting their hands dirty, dusty, as we rubbernecked.

In 1974—just ten years before or so—some construction grunts had uncovered objects so strange that they immediately quit digging.  Lo and behold, the earth yielded was a treasure trove of petrified animal life dating back to a moment, thousands of years before, when a watering hole turned death trap for a variety of animals, most of them now—and for thousands of years--extinct. 

The Mammoth Site of the Black Hills is an amazing place, a work in progress, and my son was thrilled.

Just then a voice reminded me, in no uncertain terms, that he was being lied to.

When I was his age, I was taught that the earth was some 6000 years old, that evolution was a pagan lie, that the Lord God almighty, our God, had so elaborately tinkered with creation so as to make those stupid scientists actually believe creation could older than the Bible claims it is.  I was taught that dinosaurs were sinister fabrications of snarling atheists driven to control our minds with a worldview that denied God.  Lies and falsehoods, all of it.  And I was told all of that by good, praying folks, whose hearts—I still believe—were in the right place.  They were just simply dead wrong.

There I stood, watching my son’s eyes, transfixed.  Once I overcame my guilt, I had to chuckle at devoted arrogance of sweet Christian people so blessed sure they had a corner on God’s own truth.  I’d been their victim.  If I were to believe them, what my son was eyeing in front of us that day was an preposturous, elaborate hoax. 

The expansive reach of the first verse of Psalm 90 feels a lot like universalism.   For all generations, Moses says, you, Lord, have been where we live, work, and have our being.  All generations, he says.  Does that include the slave-holding Egyptians?  And what about the Israelites themselves, a people who’d forgotten this God, a God who, once they’d cleared the Red Sea, had to give them all new rules for holy living.  What about the Jews who didn’t know Yahwah?  Were they too part of that all?  And what about Asians?—what about those who crossed the Bering Strait and put down dwelling places on the Great Plains?  What about those folks in sub-Saharan Africa, or Australia’s Aborigines?  Who is all included in this all?

And now the second verse—“from everlasting to everlasting” this God reigns.  I wish someone had taught me as much and as well about God’s expansiveness, his omnipotence, his everlasting love. 

But then, we’re more comfortable, I suppose, pointing proudly at we’ve placed behind glass quite comfortably in our own museums than the limitless open stretches of wilderness before us. 

We’re human; pride comes easier to us than awe.

The Spakenburg Socks - finis

Here's the thing.

It's become something more than a game with us, which is not to say that there's no joy in it because there is. I keep a pile of clothes on a shelf high up in the closet, and that pile grows and grows until the whole lot of it gets delivered to Zestos, the relief agency just up the street, an organization who never has to buy anything but more space for the goods they so abundantly accumulate in our consumerist culture--of whom I am one, and a frequent contributor.  

The Spakenburg Socks, despite their historic significance, will soon, I'm thinking, become part of that pile of excess, in large part because I don't need them, or won't when I go to the Home, where I am bound. What's more, as anyone I know understands, it's an act of mercy to my children to get rid of life's abundant stuff so that my children don't have to slug their way through all the detritus and haul it out of the house, socks and shoes and pens and pencils, Christmas lights and big, wide canvas photographs. Whatever the two of us can get rid of is abundantly less work for our children.

So the socks will go, maybe to someone who really needs big, fat woolen socks. This winter, their numbers could be legion. 

What I've written for the last few days is something of an elegy, I suppose. After all, those died-in-the-wool Spakenburg-ers weren't wrong about the outlines of class: generally speaking, heavy wool socks aren't standard wardrobe for professors. Those old woolen socks weren't worn more than a dozen times. Once I put them up on the pile on the shelf upstairs, honestly, I'm not going to miss them. I'd forgotten about 'em, after all. I'm saying all of this only because, hey--there they were at the bottom of a box I hadn't opened for a year or more.

What I'll miss, however, is the story that emanates in from them. When I give them away, what I'll miss what they represent, the story they still tell. Neither of our children will remember much of that, and neither of them, post-funeral, will pick that pair of socks out of a drawer and say, "Oh, man, remember these?" 

Nope. I'm the only one who knows the story they tell. I'm the only one who hears it. When someone down the line pays a quarter for 'em at Zestos, that someone won't say, "My word, I can't believe Jim Schaap threw these things away."

Nope. A sock is a sock is a sock, and, this winter especially potential warmth is the only qualification of any regard--"You don't see real wool socks like that around anymore. I'll take them for Elmer. He'll love 'em." 

One of the most gorgeous cathedrals in the world is in Venice, where, once long ago, certain townspeople and clergymen understood that for the locality to get on the map, it needed a relic or two. So they went off to Alexandria, where supposedly Saint Mark was martyred, and pilfered whatever was left in his grave, then took the goodies home.

That cathedral is the Cathedral of St. Mark. Here it is. It's unbelievable really.

Relics--the bones purported to be the remains of St. Mark of the Bible, one of Jesus's disciples--made the basilica and thus made the town, Venice, Italy, a viable city/state. Just bones. Old ones. 

The odd reverence I hold for the Spakenburg socks is an almost obscene means by which to understand the jaw-dropping beauty of St. Mark's Basilica, but, impossible as it may seem, there's a connection. We come very easily to veneration, imbuing relics, artifacts, items drawn from our ordinary lives with meaning and beauty and truth far beyond whatever value that artifact has or will ever have, and we do it, often as not, out of love, devotion, remembrance.

Think of it this way--given our circumstance here and now in northwest Iowa, chances are that no one named Elmer will eventually wear the Spakenburg socks. In all likelihood, right now, his name will be Luis or Pablo or even Jesus, and he may well be someone here without documentation or awaiting a hearing. He may wear them to a milking parlor or construction site. Chances are, he may never have heard of Spakenburg, or the Netherlands, for that matter. Could be, when he pulls them off at night, he can't help but think how blessed he is to be here where his family is safe.

Now just telescope a bit. Maybe someday, his own kids will remember the Spakenburg socks because they've never forgotten how hard the old man had to work in those early years. Maybe they'll smile when they're picking through Dad's things. Maybe one of them will keep them, to remember.

Who knows? 

I'll give them up, but I want the world to know that they've earned some veneration in my heart and soul--and, with blessing from above, maybe someday they will tell yet another meaningful story. 

I like that. It's a story I can live with.

Morning Thanks--Spakenburg Socks - iii

Although I don't remember seeing any, we were aware that the Spakenburg locals would occasionally don traditional costuming and look--for all the world--like something right off the street in Orange City (during Tulip Festival, that is). It does seem to me, in retrospect, that we were aware of such manifestations, and that, should such costuming have appeared, we wouldn't have been terribly surprised. I don't think we did.

The Spakenburgers love of the old days was another indication that we were dealing with immensely conservative people, who, oddly enough, lived in a country and culture thought to be among Europe's most progressive. When we descended from the church balcony and reentered what seemed Noorderkirk's expansive social hall, we'd become celebrities. Among those conversant only in the Dutch language, we were, most certainly, the only young couple from America, with a real Dutch name too yet, and a Professor, in fact, at a Reformed college in the U.S. And we'd just come in off the street. We were a phenom.

I suppose it happens to any American ethnics: you return to the country of origin, look around at the people, and can't help but think you know them, not because any are blood relatives, but because Irish-Americans, like Greek-Americans and Dutch-Americans, host resemblances in their DNA. 

See that picture above? I picked it up off the internet, but if I were to name those Spakenburgers--from the left: Mrs. Kramer, Mr. Huisinkveld, Mrs. De Jong. The little boy is of Mrs. De Jong's daughter, Emily; and on the far right is Mrs. Van Kampen--chances are, you would believe me. 

The Schaap family, highly celebrated right then, was, oddly enough, quite sure that we were surrounded by relatives. In a sense, we felt like home. We weren't home, and there was this language problem; but I'm saying it felt as if we should know all of the people in that church--and their kids.

It wasn't a Sabbath, but the church was full of people, most all of whom had left their youth some time earlier. They were terribly proud of what was going on right then. They led us into yet another big room, this one full of stuff ("stuff in the basement" stuff) for sale because the church was raising money for a mission somewhere in west Africa. Sound familiar? We'd walked into a church fund-raiser. No, Toto, we weren't at all far from home.

I told Barb and the kids that we really couldn't leave without buying something and thereby proving our inherent righteousness, as well as thanking them for their hospitality. "If you see something you like," I said, and then nodded.

Just so happens that lying right there on a table in front of me was a neatly folded (you'd expect not?) work shirt, the style with two bulging pockets. I picked it up, admired it--it had to have been hand-made. Wherever we went by then, we drew a crowd. "Mooi," I said, or something similar--"beautiful." I tried to make clear that I liked it, and I did. I swear one of the women just about tore it from my hands. She wasn't angry, but she was serious, even insistent. "Niet voor een prof," she said, or something similar.

What she was saying was a work shirt like that simply was too blue collar. A professor required something more professorial. I honestly got the impression that a work shirt like that, for me, was off-limits. Something like this--

I don't remember if either of our kids or my wife bought anything at Spakenburg Noorderkirk, but before we left I picked up a pair of wool socks, so heavy and thick that, last winter, they probably never got out of the back room.

But last week, wind chills got ferocious--minus 50 for several days in a row. So I dug out the super-warm clothes, rooted around a bit, and came up with a pair of gray wool socks whose story I'd almost forgotten until I picked them out of the corner of that box. Just in case you've forgotten--here they are, the Spakenburg socks.

_____________________ 

Sorry, I'm too much the Calvinist to let this go. There's got to be a moral to this story. Tomorrow I'll see if I can't pick it out. BTW, today's temps should flirt with forty!

Morning Thanks--The Spakenburg Socks - ii

Thirty years ago, there were still some Hollanders who didn't know English--not many, but some. Still, it came as a surprise that the people in the church, the people we met that day, didn't understand me when I tried to explain how it was an entire American family had just walked in off the street--and it wasn't even Sunday. We knew that Spakenburg, an old fishing town, had a reputation as a really conservative place and that we'd be dealing with conservative country people, maybe those least likely to get along well with the English language. Today, I'd guess, the vast majority of Dutch are English speakers. 

We parked the car and even before we walked in we realized that something was happening in the church; ours wasn't the only car in the lot. I can't imagine that we didn't make quite a stir. Suddenly, a entire family of Americans walked into the church for no apparent reason. 

They were no unfriendly, but language was a problem. I'm fifth-generation Dutch-American, so the mother tongue is really some long lost ancestor. I'd taken German in high school and in college, long enough to realize that I wasn't blessed with extraordinary gifts, but also long enough to understand that things like word order in German and Dutch weren't all that much different. My kids were just old enough to be embarrassed and were at the way their dad used a combination of wild-eyed gesticulation, too much volume, and strangled German to try to communicate. 

Somehow, to my kids' chagrin, I went at it. "Professuuur," I said, pointing at my chest. "Schaaps," I told them, trying to lasso the whole bunch of us with my arm. "Professuur at Gereformeerde Universitat in America," or something lamely equivalent, I told them, trying to let them know these strange foreigners were not to be feared. They straightened up, looked at each other as if to share their vital understanding that as professor this American was some standing. Had I claimed to be a rock star, it wouldn't have mattered--but a professor!

Our initial attempts at conversation were enough for them to going to look for a man who knew some English--emphasis on some. To him, I was able to communicate that I was writing a book that included a story about Noordekerk. That was impressive, fascinating. I told them the book was about the occupation, told him, in the same language stamppot, that I wanted to see for myself the church where this young couple had taken communion on a Sunday night in 1944, resistance fighters very much in love.

He raised a hand and started walking. He wanted us to follow--I had no idea why. He took us into the nave--it's a big church--and then to a back corner stairs we took up to the church balcony. He wasn't explaining anything, just kept pulling us along as if what he had to show us was something I would most certainly appreciate, something, obviously, he did. 

When he got us up behind the balcony pews, he kicked at a fairly substantial throw rug, then reached down and swept it out of the way. There, beneath, was a door, maybe ten feet long and three feet wide, cut into the floor of the upper balcony. He grabbed at an inlaid handle and swung that door open and pointed.

I don't know if he used the word razzia or not, but immediately I knew the story he was telling me, or some equivalent. What he was showing me was an otherwise invisible hiding place where people like Diet and Hein could have gone in to that Sunday night they were together here--if the SS had suddenly pulled up outside the church to look for young men to ship to Germany to some munitions factory, an action the Dutch called a razzia. What he was showing me was a hiding place for onderdijkkers, those who "dived under" to avoid conscription or prison or even death at the hands of the Gestapo or the Dutch Nazis, the hated NSBay.

Hein didn't carve his initials into one of the pews, and there weren't any  inscriptions with hearts or valentines. Our tour guide couldn't have known either of them, of course, although he was old enough to hold memories of the Occupation. In all likelihood, Diet and Hein were in attendance at Spakenburg Noordekerk only once in four years, although, like the church itself, both of them were Gereformeerde.

What the man with some English had shown me was exactly what I came to see, to note, to witness. I could not have guessed that this particular church would have built-in hiding places for people like Diet and Eman, sanctuaries in the sanctuary to hide those who feared being discovered; but there it was, cut into the floor of the church balcony, visible proof of what only my imagination could generate from the harrowing tales Diet Eman had related. 

There were other great moments on that initial trip to the Netherlands. We did the normal things people do when they visit--found the towns where our ancestors lived before immigration, in the province of Friesland and on the island of Terschelling.

But the church at Spakenburg had already given me what I'd come to see, to witness. 

Not to worry. I haven't forgotten the socks. They're on stage only for Act III--tomorrow.

Morning Thanks--Spakenburg socks - i

There they sat, at the bottom of a box of real winter stuff, unused and totally unnoted because the winter just hadn't been cold enough. Last week--my word!--it got cold enough.

They may well be my only pair of woolen socks, but they are not the only pair of thick, winter socks. Chances are, if I hadn't been looking for a old and warm waffle-knit shirt, they'd still be in the back room, unused, hiding in the corner of that box of cold weather stuff--actual "stuff in the basement." 

The minute I saw them, I recognized them, not for being the only pair of warm woolen socks I have, but because of the story that resides with them--not in them, but with them, the story of how it was they came to be down here in the basement, our basement, my basement. 

We were in Spakenburg, the Netherlands, the whole Schaap family, because I wanted to see what that world looked like--I had to see it to write about it. We'd scored some cheap tickets--the early 90s--and thus decided to take a family trip to the Netherlands. None of us had ever been there. We were and are all of Dutch ancestry.

I'd come to know a woman named Berendina (Diet) Ehrlich (she would soon change her name to her maiden name, Eman), a Resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. I wanted to help her write her life story. I thought I'd be far more helpful to her and the cause if I knew what her world looked like, the world where she'd walked so many back roads through the years of the Occupation, working ceaselessly and dangerously to keep alive the Jews she'd hidden with Dutch farmers. 

Her Resistance work originated when her fiancé, a man named Hein Sietsma, read Mein Kampf and determined that Dutch Jews were in peril. Hein grew up in the country, a tiny town named Holk, where his father was the principal in a little Christian school I'd visited the day before. The two of them were working for a makeshift group of resistance fighters they'd come to call Group Hein, but the two of them, very much in love, had not been working the same 80 acres. They'd deliberately separated because they didn't want to know much about what the other was doing--and for a very good reason: should either be arrested by the Gestapo, they didn't want to know much because the Nazis employed fiendish tortures to get men and women singing. If you didn't know anything, you couldn't give up significant information.

Diet and Hein were Christian kids. This was, after all, a Christian organization, built on the premise that what was happening to Dutch Jewry was contrary to the teachings of the scriptures. Resistance was a terrible task, imminently dangerous, but, to them, something that simply had to be done. God wanted it done.

Barbara and I bought cheap tickets to go to the Netherlands because I wanted to see at least some of the places Diet told me about when we spent a week going through the her story. I wanted to see that little Christian school in Holk. I wanted to drive down roads north from Arnhem, roads filled with refugees when Operation Market Garden went bust, unable to take "the bridge too far." I wanted to see her world.

Diet and Hein were young and in love, and it hurt both immensely that they couldn't spend more time together. They were engaged--she had a ring, and her wedding dress hung in her closet in her parents' home in The Hague. But she didn't live at home, couldn't really, never got there once the SS started snooping around, visiting her parents and asking about their daughter. 

So they'd meet clandestinely, when they could, where they could, and one of those places was the church at Spankenburg, where they knew they could see each other. It would be some Sabbath night, a place to meet and celebrate communion together in a place no one knew either of them.

What I couldn't imagine--and still can't--is the immensity of their passion for each other in the middle of that cauldron of horrors the Occupation brought to every segment of Dutch life--from the Catholic south to the Reformed north, to cities and towns and even to a thousand Dutch farms and dairies. In the middle of all of that, and the omnipresent danger of being caught, these two young lovers would meet in a safe place, at church, for communion. One of the churches she mentioned was the church at Spakenburg. That's why we were there. 

I wanted to see the church. That's where the story of my gray wool Spakenburg socks begins. 

Noorderkerk (Geref. Kerk Vrijgemaakt), Spakenburg, the Netherlands

__________________

More on the Spakenburg socks tomorrow.

Handel for second-graders*

 

Visceral reactions aren't always pretty, not in an old men anyway. I get 'em and I'm not always proud of 'em; but not being proud of 'em doesn't mean they don't come anyway--they're visceral, after all. No one asks them to show up.

I'll give you one. We're obligated to attend Christmas concerts every December. I sound like Scrooge, and I'm not; but there is a you-better-show-up thing in full operational mode because every other grandpa and grandma in a three-state region'll be there, for pity sake. What?--you don't love your grandkids? 

'Course we do. Love 'em to death. And I wouldn't mind going to Christmas programs either if every other grandparent in the three-state regions wouldn't be there by the time we arrive. BUT THEY ARE. We've got to park a quarter-mile away. Listen, we're Dutch, which means cleanliness is next to Godliness, but so is being someplace ON TIME. 

So what? Just about everybody else is Dutch too, which means we show up 20 minutes early, park halfway to South Dakota, and then walk forever, up hill, to get to the auditorium.

When I'm huffing and puffing, I tell myself the adulation we lay on our kids is akin to idolatry. Four-year-olds play soccer and hundreds lug lawn chairs out to watch. An elementary school puts on a Christmas show, and it's SRO in a space the St. Paul Symphony Orchestra or the Boston Brass couldn't fill in a month of Sundays.

I can get owly. Viscerals'll do that.

Then I get inside. Place is packed. Here and there stripes of open benches beckon, but somebody's saving that space. Hundreds, no thousands of people. Seriously. If you want a good seat, you should have come yesterday.

So last night was another, a Christmas music program featuring a couple hundred kids--pre-kindergarten to fourth grade, all of them darling, I might add, all of them sweet Yuletide angels. Nothing spectacular, not some extravaganza, just plain music, Christmas music.

And then, halfway through, something I would not have thought possible--The Messiah. That's right Handel. Okay, it was a pee-wee version, but it was, without a doubt, the masterpiece. Don't know if Handel would have approved, but if he had a grandson or daughter in the bunch, he would have been all smiles.

I was. Our grandson is a kid one of his great uncles or aunts from the Netherlands once described as "a serious little boy," a kid who can lost in Legos, who could live for days-on-end surrounded by nothing more than Transformers. 

Second-grader. There he was amidst the throng, singing Handel. Second grade. Handel.

Imagine this, a couple hundred tiny kids in matching t-shirts walk on and proceed, many of them anyway, to wave to their grandparents a mile away in the auditorium. The director steps up, raises his hands. Silence. Then, just like that "And the glory of the Lord" fills an auditorium that's already overflowing by finding ample room in the wide open hearts of  a loving and totally beguiled crowd.

Did those little kids know what they were singing? Sure. Did they know that what they performed was perhaps the most celebrated piece of music in the world, an oratorio created in just a few weeks in 1741? Did they know how blessed they were? What they know is they sang parts of the masterpiece, even the "Hallelujah Chorus" to a standing room only crowd that got to its feet and stood.

He's just a little boy on a wide stage with a hundred other little boys and girls, second graders and third and fourth. Together, they sang The Messiah. I'm not making this up.

It's Christmas, and the world sometimes feels genuinely enchanted because, in so many ways, the story we celebrate is so much bigger than we are. Last night, when I left that auditorium, what was visceral in me made me wipe away a tear because I couldn't help think that it's so good for him to know--for all of us to know--that we are very much part of something so much bigger than we are. 

Listen to this. Last night, my eight-year-old grandson sang the "Hallelujah Chorus." 

From The Messiah. I'm not kidding. Handel. My grandson.

The walk back to the car didn't take long at all--all of it downhill. 

___________________ 

*From five years ago--Dec. 20, 2017. Can't help it. Still love it.