On the death of the church library

There are plenty of other things worth going to war about. The loss of church libraries is no omen of coming of the "end times." It's happening, and even though I'm quite sure the vast majority of folks in, say, North America, won't be startlingly affected should church libraries disappear totally, it's clear, or so I read, that churches are dumping their libraries, getting rid of them because of plain old disuse.

Lest you think this sometime-writer about to sound the alarm, the truth is I don't remember checking books out from a church library. When I was a boy, I do remember reading some books about the Sugar Creek Gang, adolescent reading my mother insisted I read. I'm guessing I got them from the church library at First CRC, Oostburg. But standing in a library having someone check it out officially (it would have been Allie June Ver Velde, I remember that)? Nothing there in my memory. I looked. It's empty.

Furthermore, my God-fearing parents never used the church library much either, at least not that I remember. Truth be told, the home in which I was raised contained no really diligent readers, no one capable of getting lost in a book, no one who had to told to get his or her nose out of a book. I'm quite sure my parents would have been thrilled to see me lost in that fashion, but their behavior never established reading to be anything other than something that "it's a good thing to do."

We had a library in our house, as I remember, a goodly chunk of it composed of Bible commentaries that Dad inherited from his father, a pastor. My sister joined a book club when she was still a kid. One of the books she purchased was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a huge study whose spine flashed a swastika that always looked compelling to me. But Rise and Fall was a brick, a tome, a year's work in my teenage imagination--something you read when you get old and don't have to play ball somewhere.

Put bluntly, my parents' library--which wasn't bad (largely inherited) never moved much, as I remember. As I said, neither of my parents was a big reader. 

This lifelong literature teacher is publicly admitting is that I've never been much of a library patron. My billfold carries library cards from two close-by towns, but I've got them only because I use their inter-library loan systems occasionally. 

Pardon my wandering. What I meant to say is the last Christian Courier features a story that examines the demise of church libraries. Please forgive all the personal stuff I've been mumbling about; I don't want anyone to think that the topic--the demise of church libraries--is yet another sign of the times. We're all not hurdling down toward destruction just yet. 

Two men of my acquaintance, both of them quite significantly older, both of them citizens of the world and its literature, told me the same story. One of them attended Calvin in the early 1920's; the other attended Dordt in the 1950s. Both carried with them their socks and underwear, a few changes of clothes, and their own personal libraries--just two books--the Bible, of course, and Shakespeare--two books of which they were immensely proud.

To them, long ago, the book was a rare treasure. Despite their differences in age, that kind of honor and import given to books has long gone. Church libraries are dying away because few people use them. Our church doesn't have a library. It has a tall book shelf, almost always full of books people in church, including me, drop off there when we're decluttering, leave on the shelf if we can find a place, doing so in pretty much the same careful manner we drop off our empty glass bottles and jars to be recycled. 

And there the books sit. They don't move much, and they look diligent. Covenant CRC hasn't had a library for a long, long time. As far as I know, there's no movement afoot to get one, despite the fact that a significant percentage of members are profs or emeriti. 

So the back page story of Christian Courier features a story about the demise of church libraries. Evidence is all around; if the barbarians are at the gate, I've never been a warrior, even if some of the books in our church collection are mine--some having been in my possession, others adorned down the spine with my name.

The more difficult question, and a question that arises with the death of the church library, is the demise of the book? That's a more difficult question. 

That's the biggie. 

Psalm 42:1

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. 

 When can I go and meet with God?”

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation that swept Native life throughout the American west in the final years of the 19th century.

Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelation. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into religious ecstasy.

If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.” The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling a vision.

As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of a culture, created a religion that played a disturbing role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

It’s easy for many of us to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42 if we’ve never felt the thirst David is talking about. But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, spiritually and physically.

That’s why the thirsty four-leggeds here would make sense to Native people—why, back then, they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song.

What’s at the bottom of this lament is nothing less than God’s apparent absence.

When contemporary Christianity turns excessively therapeutic and promises something Disney-like, something smilingly insipid, lines like these can be read as if they were nothing more than words. But humankind has all too abundant a history.

I’m not at all thankful for the story of the Ghost Dance, or even of David’s own desperation recorded here in this memorable psalm. But I am comforted in the knowledge that when my bootless cries seem to disappear into the wide-open spaces of the plains where I live, I know I’m not the first to feel abandoned.

The gift of grace in the near despair of the opening lines of Psalm 42, or so it seems to me, is, once again, that neither you nor I nor the person down the street suffering far more than we are is ever really alone.

What the record shows

 

World War II vets are almost all gone now, as is, some might say, their spirit and service. We do well to remember them, and the horrors of the war they fought. 

A friend of mine sent me a mime a few days ago--about a dozen pictures from World War II, each of them accompanied by a startling fact about that war. Several concerned what is now often called Germany's "Eastern Front." Historians often claim that the Wehrmacht never really recovered from immense losses they took from the Russian bear. Numbers were beyond imagination. Here are a few of the pics--and the shocking facts.

 Four out of every five Germans killed in World War II died on the Eastern Front.

The Siege of Stalingrad resulted in more Russian deaths (military and civilian) 
than the United States and Britain sustained, combined, in all of World War II. 

Only 20 percent of the males born in the Soviet Union in 1923 survived the war. 

The mortality rate for Russian POWs in German camps was 85 percent.

Total casualties for World War II totaled between 50 - 70 million people, 
80 percent of which came from only four countries - Russia, China, Germany and Poland.  Over 50 percent of the casualties were civilians, with the majority of those being women and children. 

One can't help but wonder about the Ukraine today. The carnage simply continues and will, one can safely assume, until the Russians or the Ukrainians simply decide there has been enough destruction and death.

These withering reminders of death in war show both sides of the war in the Ukraine know a whole lot more about death and destruction, more than we do. 

Big (and interesting) day today

Look, if you ask me, the whole mess begins with a candidate for President of these United States who, after being told he lost the Presidential election, simply refused to accept the truth, then deliberately stirred a pot of falsehood, and now has seduced millions of cultic true-believers who follow him blindly, or so it seems. "Stop the Steal" might well have been the most pernicious phrase of our time. It is and was and forever will be a lie. We all know who chartered it, who perpetuated it, and who still rides the following he created four years ago.

Start there. With a lie. And that millions believed it. That's where this chaos caught flame.

Today is just another manifestation of the festering scourge that lie created. Today, a truly historic day in American history, Donald Trump's lawyers--he has battalions of them--will argue this: while the 14th amendment makes clear that no "official of the government" can hold office if at any time he or she was once part of an insurrection. Trump's boys--and this time they are males- will argue, among other things, that Trump wasn't an officer of the government; he was the President.

What they want--and what millions of Trumpsters also want--is Trump's name on the Colorado ballot. They want him viable where some have ruled, following the 14th amendment, that he isn't.

If you back up a minute, it's hard not to identify a little irony here. Trump pledged to the pro-life crowd that he'd see to it that Roe v. Wade came tumbling down. That's what he promised, and that's what he delivered. He did so with three Supreme Court justices (amazing tally, by the way--his four years in office gave him the opportunity to name three new justices), justices from a school of constitutional interpreters called "originalists," who claim the only standard they use to interpret the constitution is to read what the words say, not adduce what the idea might have said were the signators around today: no playing fast and loose with the truth, in other words. One doesn't interpret the constitution; one reads what it says.

All three of his appointees are "originalists" or "textualists." They don't like to mess around with what's there, which means Trump's fate is in the hands of three of his appointees, all of whom believe in taking the text of the constitution at its word, not in interpreting it to mean, for instance, that the President really isn't an "officer," when 99 percent of the American people would understand he sure as heck is.

One might well expect that Trumps' three justices rule against his lawyer's determination that the line has to be interpreted--did it really mean Donald J. Trump? after all, the amendment was written up when there were tons of Confederates still ready, willing, and able to serve their states and nations. The Prince of Orange certainly isn't a reb. But that's interpretation. No go, say the originalists he gave the court.

(snicker, snicker)

But then, they're conservative (which is why they were nominated and others weren't). They're Trump appointees, and he's made it clear that he thinks they're great justices (which is Trump talk for "you better come through!"). 

Their decision-making is going to be far, far more interesting than what they rule, because the likelihood of their taking Donald Trump's name off any state's ballot is slim and none, as they say). There might well be a full-bore insurrection in the U. S. of A if they'd rule against the Orange man. It's really unlikely that they'd rule for Colorado and keep him off the ballot. How they say what they do is the lede here for sure.

Because John Roberts has an immense problem on his hands. Trump's three facsimile justices clearly create the perception that the court is just another branch of politics in America (they were appointed because of their politics!). That idea is disaster to the court. If the Supremes are to be what the constitution itself appointed (no, appoints) them to be, they may not be political. They have to render truth, unbiased. That's tough anytime, but it's really tough when the nation is at war with itself. 

Just remember, we wouldn't be here--no, siree--if our ex-President did originate falsehood, didn't determine that he was robbed by a crooked political machine that pre-determined the results of the 2020 election.

That's not true, he knew it, as did Fox News and America's mayor--I'm not so sure about the Pillow guy.

Trump is like no other President in the history of the nation. He's one for the books. And today, more of his story--and ours--will be written. Stay tuned. 

I'm guessing the court will rule against its own better judgment and let the dirty work--getting rid of Donald J. Trump--up to us, the people. 

We'll have to vote him out. We must.

Let me gloat!!!

"According to a new poll from CNN, a majority of Americans want to see a verdict in the Jan. 6 case before they vote in the election. It’s vitally important that we find out whether the former president did what we all saw him do on television or not." Jimmy Kimmel Live just last night.

Pardon my gloating, but our side so rarely notches clear and indisputable wins that when we do—and trust me on this one: yesterday we did!—it calls for a morning full of joyous expletives, or if you’re a Calvinist, at least a few well-aimed exclamation points! Let the fun begin!

The prince of Republican politics, Rep. Mike Johnson, had a bad day. Just for the record, so did the King. For those of us on the often silent, truth-and-goodness side, we couldn't have done better.

First, this sad and silly determination to impeach Joe Biden's border czar, Mr. Mayorkas. Regardless of what you feel about the Biden administration's policies on the border, Mayorkas would have been--and still may be, or so that pillar of righteousness, Marjorie Taylor Greene promises--impeached. That's never happened before in the history of the republic, a man or woman tossed from office, not for "high crimes and misdemeanors" but because the wholly Trumpian Republicans had determined it would be fun to hold hearings for week after week, scoring points with the Orange Man's throng. They finally brought the thing to a vote yesterday, and, lo and behold, two Repubs voted against it, thus defeating the motion.

Thus was this pet issue the non-wokers have used for months soundly defeated, and, what may be worse, the child prodigy of the religious right, Mike Johnson, got mud all over his sweet face because the golden rule for any Speaker of the House is that he or she should never, ever bring a vote to the floor that he doesn't know ahead of time he's going to win. The fact is, the Democrats could have pantsed him right there in the House Chamber and the embarrassment couldn't have been greater. 

For a young man who claimed Jesus himself told him to take the reigns of the House  Republicans, I can't help but wonder if the Speaker wasn't listening to Jesus when he should have been counting votes.

And there was more, much more. The long-awaited ruling on Donald Trump's bonzo claims about immunity for a president or ex-president was finally handed down. All of those from my side of the political divide claim it's brilliantly written and argued, and that in all likelihood the Supremes, a nine-person gang stacked with Trump appointees, won't even bother considering it, given the decided rulings of the three-judge appellate that heard the case a month or so ago. 

Trump lost. Sing  it from the mountain tops! Trump lost! He sure as heck did. He was arguing that he couldn't be held libel for anything because, after all, he was king, the holy ruler of his kingdom. Three judges--all women!!--said "bullshit." And that ended that, or so we hope. What fun! What a day!

And more. A perfectly reasonable right-wing, conservative Senator from Oklahoma--need I say no liberal hot bed--worked feverishly with a Democratic sidekick to come up with something to end the madness at the country's southern border. By all accounts, it promised things to the American public that clearly indicated this deal was brokered, things most Democrats would have real trouble buying. Nonetheless, these senators did it--they created something both sides could live with. In other words, they did what people send reps to Washington to do.

Alas, the word from the Orange was that he'd just as soon solve the border problem himself. Thusly, his minions caved, claimed it wasn't tough enough for the right-wing gunslingers, and threw Senator Langford, from Oklahoma, under the bus--he's already been tossed out of his state's Republican party.

Madness. But then, what else might one expect from Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz? Madness. Chaos.

Not to be seen as nay-sayers, the Republicans then brought a bill to the floor of the House, something meant to fund Israel and make them look good. The Demos, and a number of hard-right Repubs--killed that one too. The Dems claimed the bill was a ruse to cover Republican no-vote on the compromise bill hammered out painfully and signed off on by the President, a bill that would have changed our policy on the border, funded Ukraine and Israel, the bill the Repubs dumped because they want the Orange Man to do the job once he becomes the American potentate, assuming he will, of course. 

Let me count the ways. Yesterday, the Republicans lost two major attempts at legislation, embarrassingly too, and a load of kryptonite was delivered to Superman's castle in Florida.

Yesterday was a good day!!!!

The terror within

It's elusive like the wind. It takes over your life--you can hardly stand or sit or try to move; there are times when it's barely there, when you think finally it's retreated to a someplace from which I hope to God it'll never creep out again.

For three months now, I've lived with searing pain that starts at the top of my left leg and runs down to my toes like a hot wire.  This morning it's defeating; it screams no matter what position I attempt, whether I stand or sit or try to walk to the other side of the room. It's as real as my hands, my fingers. It stays in my leg, but I'm not me when it burns.

It's phantom-like, never quite the same, differs, day to day, in intensity and even position. Sometimes all I have to do is sit here awhile at the keyboard and, almost politely, it leaves--a goodly fraction of it anyway. Sometimes it lays siege to everything that will happen. It's indomitable. Pain pills quite honestly seem of little consequence. I've had epidurals twice now, but this morning, it's as if whatever evil spirit is in me sits back in the recesses of my nerve endings and, without a dime's worth of pity, turns up the heat.

Sometimes I wonder--I can't help it!--whether it's actually there, whether I've made it such a disarming force that it's created its own reality. Every morning, I wake up, sit still in peace-and-quiet and try to determine exactly what degree of burn it will bring. Slowly, I swing my legs out of bed, as if trying to let the pain sleep. I sit there for five minutes trying to talk the devil into grace, then, carefully, I pull on socks first, then a sweat pants, then, this morning, a sweatshirt. I get to my feet tenuously, expecting an attack; but If I'm blessed, I can stand without significant pain. I swing my body away from the bed and take my first step. Immediately I reach down with my right hand to soften it's return because I can't help believing it will be there.

But will it? I may be programming my body to tell me it's there. I act as if it is before it is. I'm its victim, even in its absence I am its victim. I'm so terrified that it will appear that it does. Is all of this in my head and not my back? Will I ever be able to imagine that first step entirely pain-free? How much of my morning hasn't been victimized by the dreaded terrorist pain has become? Do I tremble beneath it extremes even when it's not there? Am I that much its victim?

Pain, like memory itself is shadowy, never quite under control. Memory is conditioned by pain. I come from a rich familial tradition of hypochondriacs. To what extent is all of this even real? I can't point to a moment when it began. There was no fall, no sudden movements that set off the fireworks. There has been no origin. 

An MRI says I have a bulging disk. It may help to know that, but it does nothing to relieve the pain. My eyes don't work well right now, and if a cop would ask me to walk a straight line, I'd be headed off to station. It's something of a wonder that I haven't fallen yet. My balance isn't gone, but it's obviously wounded--is all of that the meds I'm taking? I swallow pills by the handful. 

I've been awake now for more than a half hour. Right there behind my right glude a hot wire, maybe 150 degrees, just enough to burn but not sear. The exacting current it creates runs down the back of my leg to my knee, where, right now, it stops and pools. Soon enough, it will spill down into my calf and create pain that's akin to a charlie-horse.

I've become its victim. It simply dominates. 

Now I'll go upstairs, grab some cereal in a cup and come back down. Two trips on stairs. Not fun. Thank the Lord for handrails. 

In eight days I'll see a specialist. I may go under the knife. 

I've come--well, painfully--to realize something, just a bit, of what it might be like to give up--the fight seems too unwinnable. 

Maybe that's a good thing--I mean, to know what I know.

Maybe. But it's come at a cost.  

Sciatica--sounds like a horror movie. It can't help thinking it is.

Fake News. 1964

 

Fannie Lou Hamer

Seems to me you have to cut LBJ some slack on this one. He didn't ask to be President. Didn't run for it. Came into to the Oval Office when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November of 1963, and he, Lyndon Baines Johnson, from Texas in fact, suddenly became President, leader of a grieving nation split like a ripe muskmelon over civil rights.

You've got to cut him some slack because if he's known for anything today it's for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as expanding the reach of the New Deal by declaring a "War on Poverty." He was no punch-in-the-mouth conservative, even though by nature and upbringing he was. LBJ was a progressive in every sense, despite the fact that he was raised in rural Texas, where such progressive-ness was something of a curse. 

While all of that is true, the Fannie Lou Hamer story makes him look like a skunk, worse, a racist skunk. He wasn't. Hold on to that fact. 

To say that Fannie Lou Hamer came up through the ranks would be overstatement. Born dirt poor in Mississippi, her daddy a sharecropper, she was picking cotton when she was six years old, The baby of a family of 20 kids, she quit school when she was 12. Had to. Cotton needed picking.

She was no school girl when all of this went down. She was 45 years old in 1962, when she attended a voting rights workshop in rural Mississippi run by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee--or SNCC, whose purpose was to champion human rights for black folks like Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Most white folks--even up north, even my dad--thought SNCC was a wretched nest of communists. 

But that meeting changed Fannie's life, seriously. I know--that's the kind of line people use all the time--"it changed her life." But I'm not lying, and she told people as much forever after. What Fannie Lou Hamer discovered at that SNCC meeting was that, in Mississippi at least, people who couldn't vote weren't counted human. 

At the 1964 Democratic Convention, Fannie and her SNCC friends raised hell. They were determined to take a place at the convention with the Mississippi Democratic Committee, and they weren't subtle. They barged in and told the all-white state delegation that, damnation! they were people too. The Convention tried to broker some peace by arranging for them to speak. One of the speakers was a firebrand preacher named Martin Luther King; another was this sharecropper's daughter, Fannie Lou Hamer. 

Now Lyndon Baines Johnson was scared his Southern constituents would leave him like a dead deer in a ditch if the American people would hear Fannie's speech, specifically her story because it wasn't at all pretty. One night a year or so before, Fannie and her friends were dragged from a bus, arrested and jailed in a little Mississippi town, where they then got beat up badly by the cops who'd arrested them. They'd been assaulted because they were Black--and they wanted to vote. All of that hardened her steel: "I was sick and tired," she used to say, "of being sick and tired."

LBJ figured her telling her story before the nation would so embarass and infuriate his white Southern Democrats that he could lose 'em. He could not let Fannie speak. He had to keep her still.

This part is forever worth telling. The only way the President of the United States could keep American people from hearing Fannie Lou was to call a Presidential news conference. So the networks obligingly cut away from Fannie's appearance on the floor of the convention. He had no news--well, he had fake news--so he told America on all the networks that it was nine months since the death of President Kennedy, the nine-month anniversary of the assassination. That was the whole ball of wax. Even to day, it ranks as the most useless Presidential speech in American history, real fake news.

So Fannie Lou got no nation-wide audience, and the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson passed landmark legislation for justice and equality in the land. But LBJ pushed along a war he didn't start in Southeast Asia and declined to run for President in 1968, when the country was even more fractured.

And Fannie Lou? Once the networks discovered they'd been conned, they saw to it that Fannie Lou lit up the screens all over all week long. Later, her hard work for voting rights gained her an armful of honorary degrees, and when she died, in 1977, she was buried right there in Ruleville, Mississippi, her hometown.

What's inscribed on her gravestone is pure poetry: "I got sick and tired of being sick and tired." 

Sunday Morning Meds — Psalm 42

“As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, O God.”

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is instructive or merely sensational, but one can die from thirst in four days, even if all you’re doing is praying.

 At the end of my career, classrooms were strewn with water jugs in all shapes and sizes, some monstrous. Students toted them everywhere. Even in church, in the middle of a sermon, millennials of all ages take out bottle and grab a swig as if the numbers on their internal clocks tick dangerously close to 92 hours. I just don’t get it—but I’m not of their generation.

 I’m guessing none of us—the heavy drinkers included—know the extremity of the opening line of Psalm 42, but then neither do I. I can’t remember a time in my life when. . .

 Wait a minute. I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

 Today, close to sixty years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

 Still, only a few of us know the extremity of the simile here—of thirst that rages into outright panting. And I’m not among them. I’ll never forget pouring down ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

 We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some like to think he wrote it when his son, Absalom, was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with our not packing a thermos. Water jugs have nothing to do with Psalm 42.

 What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s the kind of thirst at issue.

 On a particularly dark day for us not all that long ago, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. Racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

 I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

 Certainty is one fine blessing, but not everyone gets it. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

 Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing God is there, even when we’re sure as heck he’s not. That wonderful passage from Isaiah is a heavenly promise; the story from Acts does nothing but bring smiles. But Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

The thirst here is for nothing in a jug, for something a whole lot more than lemonade. The thirst here is for living water in the parched soul of someone who’s wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more than hot sand.

 A lot of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me that’s the blessing of Psalm 42.

Miillie's darling little memoir

Seems to me that if you lived anywhere close to Mildred Armstrong Kalish--call her "Millie," why don't you?'--life was good, even when it wasn't. What shines in Little Heathens, her glorious memoir about rural Iowa during the Depression is, well, Millie. What makes this book a wonder is Mildred Armstrong Kadish herself. Millie makes life shine. Millie is the story here.

The book is astonishing, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I'm not aware of its record of publication, but once it was out Little Heathens found its way to the desk of Elizabeth Gilbert, who reviewed books the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Ms. Gilbert, most obviously, went all giddy over Little Heathens, and, whoever makes such choices determined to spread Gilbert's review essay over the entire front page. 

Let me step in here. That's where I ran into those Little Heathens, and I was dumbstruck. Ms. Gilbert's delighted review came as a shock, not because I thought her reactions were overblown--I hadn't seen the book--but that a book that covered material Gilbert said it did somehow found its way to the front page  of Times Book Review seemed impossible. From what the review said, this Mildred Armstrong Kalish wasn't a whole lot different from your and my Aunt Mabel, a woman with a string of stories she's learned to tell delightfully--or soberly--stories about--hold on to something now--rural Iowa during the Depression.

Any landed family in Iowa had, in 2007, an aunt and uncle who could do nothing less than entertain--once you got them going--on the perilous beauty, the deadly fun of the thirties on the farm. I didn't belong to that class, but I married into it. If I knew Depression-era farm stories, I heard them from my father-in-law or two writer friends, Stanley Wiersma and Jim Heynen, who weren't quite that old but absolutely loved spinning beloved old farm yarns. 

So I bought Little Heathens, loved it, passed it along to my wife, who loved it, and found herself in it, even though her mother was Millie Kalish's age and had many similar memories, memories she shared occasionally with a wholly different spin--my mother-in-law wasn't so greatly taken with her childhood farm experience. 

Little Heathens doesn't say as much about poverty as it does about learning to make do. Little Heathens only incidentally talks about farm foreclosures because, as she honestly says, difficult discussions weren't hammered out where the kids could hear them. And this should be said too--Mildred Armstrong Kamish was born with a sweet aversion to the dark side. 

Besides, as she says, the Armstrongs were "land poor," in short, they had no money, but they never lacked for meat and potatoes. And that's one of the absolute glories of this memoir of hers: she recounts in exacting (and loving) detail how the family got by, what they wore, what they planted, how they harvested. There's more than you'll ever want to know about making head cheese, about the magic of family when teamwork was their means of survival.

Listen, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, is a wonderful book that deserved the ink it received from the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It's a ball, and dream, a blessing. A year or so later, She didn't write it until she was in her eighties, and she was 84 when it was published.  A year or so later, she  won Iowa's Emerging Author Award. 

But there are some loose ends. Millie grew up with a father. He was "banished," it seems, for some unholy reason. She doesn't talk about that, doesn't investigate either. Some readers--me, among them--can't help thinking it strange she simply refuses to know why.

But then the Mildred Armstrong Kalish of Little Heathens would deliberately and even naturally stay a room away from the kind of talk about a father who was, in her life, quite literally never there.

And there's just one line at the end of this wonderful book that furrows an eyebrow. At the end of the book, she confesses that her sister Avis, who experienced the very same Depression-era farm life, inherited the same genes and DNA, hated that same farm childhood and made it a point in her life never to return. 

Some loved the years and the place where Mildred Armstrong was reared. Some were forever scarred. 

Mildred loved it, and, trust me, should you choose to read Little Heathens,  you'll love it too and want her for a neighbor. She shines like an Iowa sky on a bright summer morning. Blind spots and all, it's a wonder-filled book.

On Those Outside Agitators

Nevertheless, while the attack on Judge Bradley was undoubtedly inspired by outside agitators, of whom "Mother Bloor" was one of the more distinguished Communists, all of those who were caught and tried in the subsequent military occupation were residents of Plymouth county or nearby territory. Many of them were bona fide farmers.

It was hard the morning after, I'm sure, hard on those dozens who'd grabbed him from his court, the dozens who threatened to hang him, the dozens who put him in the back of a truck and took off out of town. Truth be told, they'd treated him as if he were himself the cause of all their economic problems; they'd put a hub cap on his head like a helmet,pulled down his pants, then tied a rope around his neck, let him know they were about to hang the guy.

But Judge Charles C. Bradley, kneeling in the dirt at the side of a country road, wouldn't budge, wouldn't do what they wanted him to do--to swear not to carry out one more blasted farm foreclosure, like the one in Primgahr they'd just witnessed. Too many good men, too many fine farm families were being tossed off their land when it became impossible for them to keep up with payments because--as the whole world needed to know--a man couldn't make a living on corn that wasn't worth a dime, milk that a good farmer might just as well dump as bring to market. How is a man supposed to pay what he owes when there's no money anywhere?

The judge is in his court room in LeMars, they told each other, just the kind of enemy they needed. That's how it was that they were there that afternoon, April 27, 1933. They were juiced with their own righteous anger. Farmers couldn't prosper when they barely could live. So they went to Le Mars to find the damned judge.

They did everything but hang him, their anger somehow melted by time slipping by, by a brace of good sense, by the judge who, when given the chance, prayed for justice for all people. They didn't string him up, as they'd promised.

The anger didn't subside. It would take some time--years!--for handsome prices to return. But the next day there had to be some shame. Hence, as the obituary says, it was easy to blame those damned outside agitators, the commies who were infiltrating everything, bringing about no good by lighting fires that could burn down the whole county. It was "outside agitators" that turned good farmers into thugs, church men into killers. It was those outside agitators that brought grief to the county.

So it turns out that when the toll was taken and the marauders identified, they were all locals. Wasn't a commie among them. Not only that, there was regret, embarrassment, shame, along with some prison sentences.

It's just so much easier to count on others when it comes to shame and regret. Life is so much easier with "outside agitators." It's just so much easier to put the blame on nameless others. 

In 1933, right here in northwest Iowa, not all that far down the road, a gang of frenzied farmers grabbed a judge right out of his courtroom, drove him out into the country, hung a rope around his neck, slipped that rope over a telephone pole, then, blessedly couldn't do it. Amazing.

Lord knows their anger had cause. Lord knows good people lost their way of life problems far out of control, problems with no solutions they could make whole. 

It would take a decade and another world war for problems on the farm to disappear. 

But the grand idea of blaming "outside agitators" wouldn't disappear and likely never will. 

It's just too much like us.

My scarred life -- iii

Everything changed in high school. I was the first to have a sideburn, even though I hadn't touched a razor blade. My shoulders broadened, and I began to grow into a normal human being except for the orange racing stripe running down my face. Sooner or later, most of the kids in the high school I attended knew some variant of the true story, but some macho seventeen-year-olds would say, "What the heck did you do to her?"

Thus began my life as a storyteller. In college I got marked up in a full-fledged barroom brawl, but the "passionate lover" was never fully put to sleep (it would be half a century before "Me Too.") Bigots claimed the perps were Black. Outdoorsmen, had me chasing a wounded buck through naked winter foliage. Girls, well, why let the cat out of the bag; half of romance was intrigue and the other half was deception. Besides, I told myself, really--who'd want to tell the real story? 

When, dutifully, I went to the Selective Service Office for the ritual, I was well aware that the lady behind the desk would ask a uniquely personal question. Three of us, born around the same time, went in together. I made sure the dutiful lady couldn't miss seeing the bloody thing running down the side of my face.

"James," she said, “any identifiable scars?" I swear she didn’t bother looking up.

I shook my head with appropriate reverence.

"You must have some scar somewhere, don't you?" Pause.

"I can't think of any."

A little help from my friends. “Oh, Schaap, come on—you must have a scar someplace.”

Hunched my shoulders, shook my head.

“Think hard,” she said, “—everybody's got a scar somewhere--maybe on your face?”

"You got a scar above your eye where you took an elbow in basketball,” one of friends said. Teamwork.

She rolled her eyes. “Something more obvious,” she said, determinedly.

The gig was about up. “Oooooohhhh, how about this one on my cheek?”

"Perfect!!!" she said. The only time in life my scar got earned that approval. 

I was 40 maybe, maybe older, when, going through customs at the Toronto airport, I was waylaid by a box of books I'd taken along to try sell at a couple of readings I had scheduled in Ontario. Books always were a pain—taxes, sales, even prices—“what are they worth?” someone official would say. Difficult questions to answer honestly. None of those books were marked with prices. I fully intended to sell them much cheaper than usual, didn't want to haul them back and go through the whole inquisition again.

So, this time I went along with the program, tried to explain that assessing dollars-and-cents was tough when we were talking about my books. And then, of course, there was those Canadian taxes. . .

“Maybe you ought to see the guy in the desk in the next room,” the second customs agent told me, pointing, a level I normally didn’t achieve.

The two of us were in some back room, alone, a long way out of the flow of traffic. I knew I wasn’t in trouble—that wasn’t it. The question was, were they going to let me haul the books into Canada or not.

“So,” a third guy says. He’s sitting behind a wide old desk. There’s a light on above his head made me feel I was part of a crime family. “You’ve got these books. . .” He looked over the report that came with me, then at me. “So how’d you get that scar anyway?” he said.

I was gutsy. I’ll admit it. I smiled, big-time. "Scar on my face's got nothing to do with writing books,” I told him, as if I was sharing a joke.

And, nodding in silence, he took it that way, flicked his head, smiling--all he needed to do to let me be on my way.

It's a joy to imagine the incredible stories that may have shot through the minds of some people who never told me what they were thinking or got any sense of the truth: "I was two, my sister was five, and it was a couple of days after Christmas."

I wasn't much of a veteran when I took my first teaching job, so one Friday--you need to write something every Friday, I told them, as if I knew--I told them the topic was how Mr. Schaap got his scar.

That was a mistake. 

It's  just that the truth is such a bore and I've never been much of a liar. Thus, it's better for everyone concerned if I just allow people to dream up their fantasies. If they ask, I'll tell them about a morning at Grandma's house and my sister and a board game--but not until I have to, and most often, I don't. 

Little kids and old people--they like to know right off.

Long ago--I think I was in college--my mother told me I could get that old scar taken off by a process called "sanding," she said. No reason for me to carry it along anymore, not with modern medicine. But somewhere along the line I figured I'd had it for so long that I wouldn't be me without it. I don't think Mom ever understood that.

But I got a hearty lesson from a photographer-friend, who took me out to the woods at Sandy Hollow once upon a time long ago. I needed a portrait for the cover of a book I'd written, something that made me look good.

My friend, who taught art at the college, made no bones about it. She took every last proof from the left side of my face. Finally, I thought I'd ask. "You're getting the scar side," I told her, thinking maybe she hadn't noticed.

"That's the you, Jim," she said, snapping away.

I'm not so joyful admitting it, but she's right. I been carrying it for 74 years. It's hardly as crimson as it was for so long, but it's still there. I suppose when I meet people, it's still what they notice about me right away. But I don't think much about anymore. Never did really, except maybe for that junior high story about "Old Scarface."

For good or ill, that scar's me. I don't know how be without it.

Thanks, Sis. 

A Scarred Life -- ii

Scars turn white, right? Well, not this one. For reasons known only to God, mine stayed proud and red as a banner and therefore totally dominated first impressions.

Your and my scars are ours forever, so this long, red stripe of mine became second nature, so much a part of me that I most often forgot I had it--until I was shuffled into new circles and met new people, including some few who would almost immediately blurt out the question--you know, "How'd you get that thing?" Seniors, for example, and little kids. From ten to seventy, we seem to grow enough decorum not to ask. It's not polite, after all, and your mother will, sure thing, let you know it. 

But seniors and little kids often lack shame and ask the obvious question first crack out of the box. "How'd you get that mean scar, fella?" When such questions jump out at you, you can expect the shameless to unclothe their own wounds and show you parts of their bodies you weren't asking to see.

Conversation goes something like this:

"Hi--I'm Jim Schaap, originally from Wisconsin, live in Iowa now. . .”

"Bill. Bill Sanderson--where the hell you get that scar? Good night, you ought to see mine.”

You learn to live with their affrontery, as with their indecency. I've so accustomed myself to such things that I avoid exposures by making a game out of the answer before telling him or her just what I imagine he would like to hear.

“Well, I was in Chicago one night. . . "

Tried that on the first basemen of a college team in South Dakota who asked me a what the heck had happened the moment I got to first.

"In a little fight," I told him. A lie. 

"Oh, yeah?” he says, begging for the story.

When I started into a yarn, the chucker threw the ball to f1rst, and I was dead in the water. I wondered what the guy tried on the unscarred.  

As I grew up, the storied means by which I had acquired the scar changed. When I was a little boy, some moms would always bring up a cat. My mom always felt bad about their wanting the story. Never bothered me too much--after all, it was my sister's fault for tossing me around. 

Early adolescence was, well, early adolescence. People didn’t know what to think--I seemed too young for a fight and too old for a cat. And the dumb thing stayed bright red, like something lifted from a cop's car. It was tough on me back then--like talking about pimples, you know? I had this scar and I couldn't help it, so try not to stare, okay? 

My mother had a little box of pictures of her kids, a box I inherited when she died. It's hard to find any shot of her only son that doesn't feature the scarless side of my face. Mom used to "tint" black and white portraits. Mine, noticeably, are scar less. 

One day in the seventh grade, we opened our books to a story in our reading class titled, "Old Scarface", about a whale, I think. I don't think I looked up from my book for the whole hour.
_________________________

just one more day of this embarrassment. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 

“I have seen a wicked and ruthless man 

flourishing like a green tree in its native soil, 

but he soon passed away and was no more; 

though I looked for him, he could not be found.”

 

People frequently ask me what’s real and what’s not real in a piece of fiction, as if every character, every crack in the sidewalk, every 20-second gap in dialogue is somehow prototyped.  It isn’t, of course.  In a story, nothing is true true, even though, if I do my job well, everything is.  Let me put that another way:  nothing that emerges from the soul can be bereft of that from whence it came; everything in a story is real in me—something I’ve seen or touched and imagined. Almost everything I write can be footnoted, traced to something I’ve experienced. 

           

A few mornings ago I woke up with a pleasant dream of my first teaching job, 35 years ago. I don’t remember the exact image, but somehow the slot machine my mind becomes in sleep turned up an old classroom image from a stack I hadn’t thumbed through for a long time.  Why?  Freud thought he knew and so have countless others.  But I’m not sure anyone does, at least fully.  Our experiences—both real and imagined—never totally disappear, even though they're nowhere near our radar screens for years.

           

I take that back.  Some things definitely do.  I’ll never forget eating breakfast at a diner in the deep South the morning after Martin Luther King was murdered.  That greasy spoon because it was a haven for rednecks who’d been partying all night long, getting drunk on their joy about King’s death.

           

Years later, after I’d written a piece about that diner, an old friend who was with me that morning told me he had absolutely no memory of that place. 

           

“You’re kidding?” I said.

           

“Nothing,” he told me, “but I’ll never forget stopping in front of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  You remember that?”

           

For the life of me, even today, I have no memory of standing at the place where John F. Kennedy had been shot only seven years before. 

           

While our experiences shape us and shape what we write, what we say, and even how we say it, isn’t it strange that we really don’t control which of those experiences do the heavy lifting?  We act—and are, most certainly, acted upon. 

           

I say all of this because I’m not sure there’s a verse in this poem that so fully resounds with David’s voice as these do. I swear, I can almost hear him. Maybe it’s the personal pronouns. Maybe it’s their placement—that big I sitting there, front and center. This is testimony, and if you read it a couple of times you can almost feel David’s finger poking at your clavicle. He won’t be doubted.

           

I know enough about memory to wince a little at his vehemence, but I also understand that it’s all we’ve got to go on—what we’ve experienced. He says he’s seen it himself: the wicked are chaff the wind blows away. Been eye-witness. Been right there to watch. Been there. Never forgot.

           

Finally, maybe, I’m less sure of David than I am of the Word of the Lord.  And these lines are the Word of the Lord:  relax, downright evil will not get a mite less than it deserves.

           

That, I believe.

My Scarred Life -- i

When Cain murdered Abel, God planted a mark on his forehead to signify that he had sinned grievously. The mark was to stay with him for the rest of his born days so everyone would identify Cain as, well, undesirable.

I don't remember doing anything quite so horrendous as murder before my second birthday. I may have wet a few diapers and kept Mom and Dad from sleeping, but nothing quite so out of the ordinary for any run-of-the-mill kid. Regardless, I, too have borne a marking that will stay with me for however long death may tarry.

In January, 1950, soon after Christmas, our family made a trip to Grandpa's house to celebrate the holiday season. As usual, Grandma made sure she had all the seasonal goodies prepared, the new toys set out in plain view for the grandkids. Among them was a colorful, new pin-ball machine, not a big one found in pool halls, but a smaller game designed to set on the floor. As far as I can remember, this particular model looked much like any other toy pin-ball machine, except by some genius of manufacturing, the toy-makers had neglected to lay glass over the playing surface, leaving the metal pegs exposed.

That pin-ball game dominated our attention for the afternoon, and only when we ran to the holiday table did the marbles rest in the tray at the bottom of the machine.

Let me make this clear: I always liked my sister. She was three years older than

me, and she was a girl, but she never bothered me in any ways other than any usual older sister might.

After supper she went back to the living room floor and resumed play on the delightful little game, placing it next to the Christmas tree so as to get a little additional light, then bent over on all fours in front, creating an inviting little horse to any year-old cowboy. I hopped on, decided to make a game of her.

She didn’t consent to that species of horseplay. She wriggled and shook at first, kind of half-heartedly, then told me to get off. Truth be told, my weight was not enough—I was not yet two--to take her attention off the marbles zigzagging down through those posts. When she decided she had enough, she lifted her feet like a rodeo bronc, and catapulted me success­fully off her back, and so began my life as a marked man.

I flew off and made a perfect one point landing in the field of posts set into the wonderful Christmas toy. Those nasty little posts did their thing, or, so I am told, because when I came up for air my face looked like Antietam.

In moments, I guess, both parents and grandparents were at the sight of the accident, bemoaning my bloody face, and saying rather nasty things about "such a dangerous toy.” I was almost-two, so I started bawling, especially when Mom told me I was going to be all right after a visit to the doctor.

I’m told I had quite a few gashes over my face, several of which required stiches, but one was nasty, running the up my face on the left side. Hence, me and Cain.

Unfortunately, the doctor failed to sew the wound shut quite as tightly as he should have, so the scar, even as it healed, remained, well, pronounced.

Scars turn white, right? Well, not this one. For reasons known only to God, mine had real fortitude, stayed so proud and red that it totally dominated first impressions.

___________________ 

Note: I have in my possession my mother's entire collection of Jimmy Schaap pics. Very few shots feature the left side of my face. Both Mom and thoughtful school photographers must have made sure that whopper was unseen. In this one--maybe first grade?--it's there at least. Trust me, it was. 

Tomorrow: more of a scarred life.

Twisted rails--a monument at the museum at Westerbork

One more time for a different platform--this terrific book I just read. The essay is till a WIP.

___________________ 

For many moons I've been told by friends I trust that I really need to read An Interrupted Life, by Etty Hillesum. If you are not one of those friends, Etty Hillesum was a grown-up Anne Frank, a Jewish woman living in the heart of Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. 

Both of them kept intense journals. Both unflinchingly recorded the richness of their hearts' desires amid the suffering. Both kept notebooks that, given their honesty amid the strife, today offer crucial testimony to the horrors of a very real extermination plan.

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also become richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.

The Dutch chapter of that insanity was more successful than elsewhere in occupied Europe. In 1939, the Netherlands Jewish community numbered 140 thousand. When the war ended, less than 40 thousand remained. Some nations lost more Jewish people, but the percentage was unequalled. Among those who perished were Anne Frank, 16, and Etty Hillesum, 29, along with both of their families. 

The journals are remarkably similar and shockingly different. After the war, Anne Frank's father did some editing, removing things he thought didn't need to be said. Etty Hillesum had no familial editor. An Interrupted Life is amazingly candid. 

But then it's fair to say that while the Hillesums and the Franks shared their Jewishness, they shared little else. Etty, clearly a resident of Dutch intelligencia, seems largely unaffected by the occupation for almost 100 pages of the diary. Not until the yellow stars were codified does she say much at all about the German presence all around.

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

But then, her attention is with the pressures of her own roiling interior life, a life that's so nakedly offered up in the journals. Today, Etty Hillesum was polyamorous, entertaining several different partners frequently, perhaps because to her, sexuality seems to be just another characteristic of her humanness. In a way, sex is itself therapy, as her mentor and guru appears to believe. In the Me-Too era, Julius Spier would certainly lose his license and probably his freedom. But Etty Hillesum was not an unwilling partner. "I don't think I am cut out for one man," she says baldly.

But the philosophizing gets lost in the intensity of her reflections once the Jews, the  community she is part of--if only tangentially--begins to be bullied. Those conflicts/horrors lead her to consider deeply the difficult question she faces ever more darkly--how to live sanely in an insane world. 

To live fully, outwardly and inwardly, not to ignore external reality for the sake of the inner life, or the reverse — that's quite a task.

That quest grows more pressing when her status as a member of the Joodse Raad, a Jewish council created by the Nazis to buffer relationships, grants her a unique position in the camp at Westerborg,the last stop between Holland and the death camps. Once there, Etty Hillesum lives a calling she shapes to minister to those hopeless many who hopelessly watch the trains depart.

Thirty years after people recommended the book, I finally got around to reading it when David Brooks spoke highly of it: 

One of my heroes is a woman named Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam in the 1930s and ’40s. Her early diaries reveal her to be immature and self-centered. But as the Nazi occupation lasted and the horrors of the Holocaust mounted, she became more generous, kind, warm and ultimately heroic toward those who were being sent off to the death camps.

An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork is unlike any other book I've ever read. Her life, her spirit and her creed deconstructs our ideologies. Evangelicals would be shy to claim her; she sleeps around and undergoes a self-inflicted abortion because, she says, she chooses not to bring a child into an impossibly cruel world. 

Militant Jewry would despise her passivity, even blame it for the deaths of thousands of Jews, who chose not to fight but to get on the trains lock-step. Benjamin Netanyahu has Etty Hillesum in mind when he refuses to reign the IDF. "Never again," his people say today as they destroy Gaza. There shall be no more  passivity. Most Jews would find her adoption of Christianity unsettling--she drew great strength from New Testament readings, from Saint Augustine, from Thomas a' Kempis.

Feminists would find her unshakable emotional attachment to Julius Spier embarrassing. And me? I loved the book. I should have read it years ago. 

But I was disgusted with myself. I found it so easy to be judgmental. 

From the feeder

I couldn't help thinking that the focus was off on this shot of a sparrow outside my window--and it may well be. But the portrait also features something of the wardrobe my fine feathered friends are into right now when they descend on the feeder--and descend they do: "when sparrows come, they come not as spies, but in battalions." That's not Shakespeare, but it's close.

This fella is a full winter gear. They don't throw on hats and gloves, nor wrap themselves in woolen blankets. Somehow they make do when temps get to -20, as they did last week, by just fluffing those feathers out as far as they can so they look only half-focused. More fluff is all they've got to fight the cold. Their fuzziness is a blessing.

Those fluffed-out coats keeps them warm, as does as much food as they can gobble up, both from and beneath the feeder outside my window. I can go through--correction! they can go through--20 pounds a week, although their numbers suggest that I'm now feeding more than my share of the battalions.

Wait a minute. Let me get you a shot that's wide enough to include the bush that's there at the right side of the picture. 

That's a little better, but there's only two in the bush--often enough there are more. Sometimes the goings-on out there seems a massive tag team match: ground troops battle it out until they're winded, they ascend to the bush where they touch wingtips with some buddy at rest, who then takes his or her turn in the scrum on the ground.

They're a circle of middle-school girls, moving only when someone decides to shuffle to the other side of the cafeteria. When I walk past the window, they all take flight. As they do when the jays show up.

I don't know that I've ever seen a blue jay take a shot at a sparrow. One jay equals about a half-dozen sparrows, who don't have to be told they're outgunned. The whole bunch take off in a fog when the jays grab a snack. At least they bring some color onto all that dirty snow; the sparrows, in a bunch, would look like buffalo from a drone. If you deliberately fuzz your gaze, they could be wearing fur.

The Jays flash their blessed blue, as if a chunk of sky fell just outside the back door. But they're also battle worn these days, like snow that fell a week ago. They'd be  handsome if they'd take a bath. 

And then there's the juncos, little 'uns who stay the heck out of everyone's way. They come around only when the others have et their share. They pick away at almost anything and never dare the height of the feeder. During the reign of  dusky sparrows, their white bellies bouncing along on the snow cover make them little darlings. You got to love 'em. They run from everybody, but seem to be, oddly enough, least afraid of me.

I don't know what kinds of birds St. Francis supposedly charmed, but of the residents of our backyard right now, I'd guess it would be juncos. Maybe I ought to try.

Friend of mine, a man I respect, claims that feeding birds the way I do turns them fat and lazy. A bag of bird feed is a totally unnatural form of sustenance. He can't be wrong, of course. If it weren't for me, all these troopers would have to be somewhere else, chewing up the prairie grass or pulling what seeds remain in curled up sunflowers, not dependent on that big guy with the plastic pitcher of feed.  

I don't know. This friend knows far more about birds than I do. He may well be right. Maybe I'm breaking some naturalist's law--I'm sinning by putting out feed when the temps are as low as they go. Me and St. Francis, we both have too big of a heart. 

But, good night, it's been cold.