Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, Atlanta

To say he came out of poverty would be a stretch. His family wasn't poor, the neighborhood had standing and the house had character. His parents were by no means rich, but neither were they ever destitute. For a black man in the American South, growing up in the Depression, he and his family had a certain amount of privilege. 

As a kid, he played across the street at the local fire station, where the squad--all white--was entertained by neighborhood kids.

They went to church up the block at a place made famous when, as a preacher, he came back to lead the congregation. 

It's called the Martin Luther King National Historic Park because the whole neighborhood seems holy now. Inside Ebenezer Baptist, no one talks much--mostly whispers because his sermons changed everything really. 

Well, that assessment may be exaggeration. After all, this isn't Charlottesville, but it could be.

And the truth is, certain aspects of the old way are gone now, never to return.

But all of that took some doing, and lots of it wasn't pretty. Millions of white Christians considered him a communist. He was trying to upend the system. One of those assessments was true. The other was created from fear and hate.

He spent some considerable time here, thought the cause worth the suffering. 

He wasn't alone.

Eventually, with his inspiration and leadership, thousands marched.

He took his inspiration from world leaders who preached non-violence. 

This is his copy;' those notations belong to him.

King National Park (cont)

Seems strange to think of Martin Luther King having a travel alarm, but he was human, which is to say ordinary. He needed an alarm clock, I'm sure. This is the one he had when he was murdered.

And here's the key to his motel room on a night I'll never forget. We were in the American South, driving from Florida to Louisiana. All night long, the radio was full of news stories of riots all over America. Someone had assassinated Martin Luther King as he stood on a balcony on the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. 

Every soul in the country knew why. It wasn't random.

Just like that, he was gone.

Once more, and for the last time, he was brought home to the Ebenezer Baptist Church, just down the block from where he lived, the church where both he and his father had preached, this time in a coffin behind a horse-drawn wagon.

Then laid to rest in the neighborhood where he grew up, beside an eternal flame.

Sunday Morning Meds--what comes along. . .

“He hurls down his hail like pebbles. 

Who can withstand his icy blast?  

He sends his word and melts them; 

he stirs up his breezes, and the waters flow.” Psalm 147:17

I wouldn’t call it balmy exactly, but we’ve seen worse. The weather app says 12-whole degrees right now, folks, feels like -3. It’s January, but, trust me, 12 degrees is cup of tea. On New Years Day we drove three hours north to Minnesota when the temps weren’t even close to zero. See that verse up there? I’m telling you, it’ll be months before “he stirs up the breezes, and the waters flow.”

Here’s what my friend Spurgeon says: “It is ours to submit to deprivations with patience, seeing the cold is his cold.”  Oooh, ain’t that the truth?  And then,“That which God sends, whether it be heat or cold, no man can defy with impugnity, but he is happy who bows before it with child-like submission.” 

In church that Sunday, a young couple stood up front, their toddler in arms, while the preacher let the water flow over: Baptism, a sacrament, a touch of the eternal ordained by Christ. Mom and dad were my students not that long ago. I liked them then, still do. The child shook a bit when splashed upon. People giggled. He’s their first. 

Right in front of us sat a family whose oldest child, autistic, was a presence at the sacrament, making high-pitched squeals, squirming. When he got too loud, his mother gave him her hand, touched him. Later his little sister, half his age, did the same thing, offered him her hand. 

Back then, our son had just lost most of what he owns in a fire. We were worried, not because of financial loss, but because his state of mind and soul could have tanked. But the fire may well have been phoenix-ish because new relationships offered themselves from the ashes.

I had been reading The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s haunting apocalypse novel, about a father and son trying to believe in goodness in the middle of a wasted world. That book was haunting me, even in the middle of baptism, maybe because of it.

And then there was the preacher himself, who was, with his wife, worried about their own son, a kid with more than his share of problems.

Church was a house of mirrors that morning—up front, the promises of parents holding a dear first child, while a preacher with his own promises tried to guarantee something with three thin handfuls of water. Five rows back sat parents who’ve been making a go of their son’s autism for a dozen years. Six rows back, my wife and I, worried about what got ruined in a fire—and me haunted by a novel.

If there’s a more compact set of contrary images to display the rule of God anywhere in scripture than what we find here in two verses of Psalm 147, I don’t know that I’d like to find it. Charles Spurgeon is right: “That which God sends, whether it be heat or cold, no man can defy with impugnity,” he says, “but he is happy who bows before it with child-like submission.” Of course, he’s right.

The icy blasts we’re now amidst, mid-January, are from his hand, as is what will certainly be one first great emerald morning come April. 

But it’s hard work to be child-like, when there’s so much down the road. 

But then, there’s also the promise of baptism, another Father—and we his children, our faces washed with love. Today, our son has become one of that squad of firemen who once, long ago, tried to put out fire that consumed his apartment complex and so much of what he owns. I’m not making this up.

And, listen to this, soon enough—this week!—a brand new baby will be born to the wife of that fireman.

There’s more to life than winter. 

Shitholes

The first word that came to my mind when we got to Haiti was unimaginable. Had you asked me to sketch an image of what the streets of Port-au-Prince would look like, I could not have scribbled out anything close to what I saw.

But human beings live where they're planted. Life goes on in Port au Prince, just as it does in other places I've visited. Men and women laugh and cry and make love. They get angry and cool off--they eat and drink and some of them remember and believe. They're happy. Things aren't managed as efficiently, as bountifully, or as ritually as they are here in Sioux County, Iowa, where the descendants of European Calvinists--me among 'em--won't let the sun go down on our labor.

Sioux County is the healthiest county in the state.  Why? We raise hogs, but we're not pigs. We know hot to win, so we dominate, in hogs and beef and milk and hens and basketball. We were largely white until illegal immigration. But most of our new neighbors work just as hard as we do, if not harder, most of them at jobs we're happy to give 'em because we sure don't want 'em ourselves.

What can someone like me possibly understand about Haiti or Niger or Ghana, after a visit of a few short days? Hardly anything.

Not long ago, I attended a lecture given by an ex-student whose job it is to free slaves. You read that right. He and his organization, Christian Solidarity International, reach up into North Sudan, a Muslim country full of slaves, pay slave-owners some kind of bounty, and bring those real live human beings back to the Christian South, their home, even though some of them have been away, in slavery, for decades. It's hard work and its dangerous.

You look at a crowd of freed slaves, victims of every horrendous kind of abuse you can imagine and worse, people who've survived a long war in which two million of their country men died and six million lost their homes, and you see in their gaunt faces, their vacant eyes, a level of suffering not seen even on the streets of Port au Prince, those streets I couldn't help thinking, at first glance, were "unimaginable."

But what do I know about suffering? I live in Sioux County, Iowa. I'm retired, and I go to the gym every day. Today it might well be 10 below outside my window, but I'm barefoot on a heated basement floor.

Here's what I do know. If there is a God, and if he hears our prayers, then sure as anything he hears all of theirs too, those prayers uttered by Haitians and Sudanese and rural folks from Mali. In fact, those prayers may well come louder to God's ears than mine; they're being rung from much greater need, people whose future is so immediate it's stretches before them no longer than a day, whose work, whose job, whose profession it is simply to stay alive.

If God exists, and I believe he does, he hears every last one of those prayers because He hears every last one of us who call on his name. That's what the Bible says. What he answers is his business. But we know he listens.

I know something about Haiti--I've been there. I've been to the west African countryside in Ghana, Niger, and Mali. I've been to places where people live in abodes that look nothing like mine or anyone else's in the neighborhood. But I'm no expert. I was in and out.

I do know this, however--God almighty listens to every last one of us, Sioux County's most fit, Haiti's street people, those suffering South Sudanese, slaves and free, and barefoot tribal folks from rural west Africa. He hears them all, millions of us. That's what is really unimaginable. 

And I know this too. Our God does not think of where those people live as shitholes. 

Two great movies

Two of the finest motion pictures of the year, histories really, two films, oddly enough, set in the same moment of time, couldn't be more different. If you haven't seen Dunkirk, brace yourself, but by all means see it. It's all action, but substantive, not Hollywood. I've never been to war, but when that movie's credits finally rolled, I knew I'd been someplace where I'd just as soon never return.

Dunkirk takes us to war. There were moments, lots of them, when I wanted to turn away, wanted not to see what the film so generously shows. The dialogue is minimal; we don't discover much about the whys and wherefores. All we know is that tens of thousands of Brit troops are being routed on the French shore, and the outlook is worse than grim. 

And then, finally--I honestly kept waiting and kept waiting for it--a thousand fisherman and pleasure boaters make the trip over the English channel to rescue those tens of thousands. That I waited and waited and waited for the image of all those dinghies coming over is itself an indication of the film's genius. Even though everyone knows the rescue is coming, when all those little boats show up, the relief is palpable. No film will ever replicate reality, but when the channel fills with rescuers, your heart leaps.

The Darkest Nights has very little of war but lots of terror, the terror war ushers into the hearts of those who have to make vital decisions. It's nothing at all like Dunkirk. You never want to turn away; you want to see every minute. One short sequence of the combat front takes you to a company of soldiers following orders to fight to the finish, a rear guard action. But most of that from above, just as you do other scenes in this riveting movie. Every few minutes the director chooses a shot taken from far above the immediate scene, almost as if to remind you that you aren't there so as to relive the tension of the story the movie tells.

Both movies are scary. Only when Dunkirk ends can you breath again. Dunkirk takes a physical toll. All that action viscerally consumes you. 

The Darkest Hour is scary for old peaceniks like me because I found it impossible not to believe I wouldn't have sided with Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax in "the darkest hour," would have done everything I could to avoid the horror of millions of Brits dying in some impossible dream of, well, "victory" against the madman Hitler. Winston Churchill, portrayed here frequently as a bumbling, overweight drunk, is just mad enough to believe that the only way out of the battle to come is to fight. 

It's a mad idea, really, and the movie makes it seem all of that, even though we know so much more than Churchill and Chamberlin did at the time, even though they had never heard of Auschwitz or Buchenwald or Bergen-Belzen. What The Darkest Hour makes very clear is that for a moment in time Great Britain was absolutely in its darkest hour, a moment when madness had to reign. 

Quite frankly, there were moments when Winston Churchill reminded me of Donald Trump, an eccentric blowhard who couldn't or didn't take the time to think through what was coming from his lips or cell phone. What's scary about the film is that England needed Churchill, despite his moody madness, his incessant drinking, and his mad notion that fighting to the death was the only way to live. 

In his inaugural address, Trump tried to set a vision of the temper of the times that was as dangerous as the world actually was in 1940. That speech, "American Carnagae," may well never see its match because it created an assessment of the nation so bleak as to require the truly moral resuscitation only a "stable genius" could administer. In those moments when Churchill's eccentricities somehow felt akin to Trump's, just remember Churchill was looking at the mass death of tens of thousands of Brit troops on the front steps of a war that, almost inevitably, Hitler would be taking to the British Isles. 

That's a whole different definition of carnage.

Don't miss either of these films. One makes you feel, the other makes you think. They're both incredibly good--which is better is a childish question, even though they're both about the same moment in history. If Hollywood frustrates you, if you think Hollywood couldn't do better at turning out sheer stupidity, be sure to see Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour. It sounds wrong to say it, but it's true: no medium can teach history as well. 

The Bread and Wine

Basically, I was, back then, and still am a conservative. I believe in the currency of many old-fashioned values and skeptical of wild-eyed liberals who carry a grudge against what once was. But then, I'm skeptical of wild-eyed people of any persuasion.

Years ago, someone put my name up to be a member of a denominational committee created to look into allowing children to partake of the Lord's Supper. I may well have been more fundamentally conservative than any one on that committee, but some were sure the church would not survive if children would continue to be barred. 

What I remember best about that committee work was another committee member, a preacher, saying in our first meeting that change would be difficult when it comes to the Lord's Supper because "communion" may well be the one thing people in our fellowship would call sacred. If all of life is religion, as some of my confessional brothers and sisters like to say, then no one thing can be.

Except, this preacher said, the Lord's Supper. People are going to have especially strong feelings about how they do the bread and the wine.

Maybe that's why I was a little surprised when a local pastor served up the Lord's Supper in the old folks home where my father-in-law is a resident. A friend who used to pastor an old folks home told me the Missouri Synod Lutherans told him they couldn't approve of the Eucharist being done in any other way than their own. Thus, no, he should cease and desist from doing communion. 

Once upon a time some in the Reformed family would have similarly frowned upon the table, the elements, being done so freely, not being supervised by proper church authorities. 

But the sacrament got done that Sunday a couple of weeks ago. The pastor had a woman along to help (that could have been a problem too). Dad's Home is the last its residents will ever have. It's a lovely place, a kind and caring place; but no one leaves there alive. So less than half of those wheeled in that Sunday afternoon probably had a clue what was going on, despite the fact that they'd taken communion for most of their 90 years. 

Here and there, nurses and aids helped some participants take-and-eat. Some simply didn't bother. When that woman elder tried to put a thimble full of grape juice in front of a woman just a few feet away from me, the nurse smiled and waved her off. Some residents slept through. 

It wasn't perfect. It wasn't awesome or sweetly sentimental. I'm not about to dispense a description that will have you reaching for Kleenex. 

But then, neither was the sermon. It was delivered well under the circumstances, out and up front, away from the podium as if the young pastor wanted to be sure that what he was saying made it into the minds of the people to whom he'd come to minister. 

It was a wonderful homily, but my father-in-law can't hear you if you're more than five feet away and shouting. I'm sure he didn't catch a word of it, and any cursory look around the room would have suggested he wasn't the only one left unconnected. Billy Sunday couldn't have done any better.

But for those of us who did partake, for me at least, the sacrament was a touch of the divine, not because people were remarkably moved by their participation, not because they wept or shed tears at drinking that thimble-full of wine. It seemed wonderful to me because that communion was so shockingly tactile, so much of the senses. The Lord's Supper tastes and smells in a fashion not even a stemwinder sermon can. Some may want to argue the old Reformation line and say that it's not the real body and blood; but whatever it is, it's vital. You can hold it in your hands. You can eat it and drink it.

And for some residents, maybe even for Dad, it was something they could take home, something they understood. I can't imagine he heard or understood much of the warm homily, but when he had the elements in his fingers, he participated.

Something about that I loved. It was wonderful, a blessing. It was what the Lord's Supper should be. It was sacred.

Coteau de prairies

I wasn't born and reared here. My home--I'm not sure how anyone finally defines that word--is really the western shore of Lake Michigan, where sunrise is almost always worth catching, but sunsets are, well, meh. When, initially, I lived out here on the emerald edge of the Great Plains, my most immediate adjustment was to realize that there was an east. Where I was reared, the big lake was all there was to "east." (See that M on Lake Michigan? Go west to the shore. That's where I grew up.)

It's not difficult to simply look over or past the neighborhood where you live, to be taken in and to love particulars, its cities or towns. Out here, even counties are quite colorfully distinguishable--"Sioux County" isn't "Lyon County," as citizens of each are likely to say, rolling their eyes. Neighbors we are, but the labels mean more than simple geography, things we learn to love and hate, things that can consume us.

A couple of nights ago I stumbled on a French phrase that was new to me--coteau de prairies, a name given to a landform that doesn't so much describe us--it's a more clearly visible north of here--as it has come to define us, living as we do in its wash. Those two blue arrows designate lobes created long, long ago by a melting glacier, a space where a mighty glacial meltdown split around a point of land that wasn't inundated. The James Lobe--the blue arrow to the left--follows the James River Valley--"follows," is deceptive: the James Love created the James River Valley would be more accurate.

To the right lies the still distinguishable track of the Des Moines lobe, which, as you can guess, formed the Des Moines River watershed. You may already have noticed that the divide at the northernmost point of the coteau de prairies, in far southeastern North Dakota (got to get there someday soon!) created a real parting of the ways because the James Lobe is Missouri River bound. It's brother (or sister) is Mississippi River-bound; all of which makes the couteau de prairies more significant than it may seem if you're trying to make good time to Winnipeg. 

Today, the plateau--for that's what it is, in a way--is home to innumerable wind turbines, and you can guess why. The wind--always blustering here--is most clearly distinguishable  along the spine of this ancient land form. Hundreds of windmills churn out power that goes east, where it's dumped into the grid that powers the east. Thank me when you turn on your computer. 

Here's a close up, along with points of significant interest.

It's a bit of a stretch, I suppose to say that we're a part of the coteau de prairies. Chandler or Leota, MN or Bemis or certainly Sisseton, SD residents would likely mount some derisive laughter at my assertion. But we do garden in loess soil right there between the James and DesMoines lobes. We are somehow recipients of what makes the landform.

I don't think it would have made any difference if I'd known all of this 40 years ago, when I moved to the southernmost limits of the coteau de prairies. Maybe if I'd grown up here, I would have been about it, wouldn't have had to stumble over it when I was almost 70. But I did, and at least I know now.

But there's something almost scary about looking at maps like this, maps largely a-political, maps that don't distinguish much more than names--otherwise, nothing human beings have made, only what the Creator has so marvelously fashioned.

To know I'm part of what's there and so foreign--it makes me feel small.

And this one too--Lewis and Clark's incredible attempt at mapping out a region known only to its strong aboriginal inhabitants. They're trying to figure out just exactly where they are. And here we are again.

When they left upriver, they called the place where they'd buried Sgt. Floyd, "Floyd's Grove"--you can see it right above where I've located Sioux City. If you look closely, you'll see the Floyd River there too, a frozen waterway, right now, which is a hundred yards north of where I'm sitting. And if you're wondering about Prickly Pear River, so am I. 

Of course, what the Corps of Discovery created isn't anywhere near to scale, but it's marvelous anyway, isn't it? What's written in are the names they had and used for the region's teeming first nations--Yanktons, Tetons, Ricaras, Sisatoone, Wapatoota. 

It's more than a little silly to think that when the Creator God looks down, somehow this is what he sees, something akin to Google Earth. Besides, we like to say he looks into all of our hearts, which makes maps beyond silly, and God beyond anything we can sketch out on parchment anyway. 

But a couple nights ago I stumbled on these maps when I noticed that French phrase, when I stumbled, oddly enough, into my own world, as it is and as it was. 

And at least for a while again, I felt humbled because such things are, aren't they? To see how this everyday world we know is someone else's too and even something else altogether.  Or was. 

And still is, and forever shall be. Amen. 

What the dawn can do

Correct me if I'm wrong--or feel free to disagree--but there's something phony about this picture, something wrong, something even eerie. It's mine; that is, I took it. But I can't help but think I created something, well, grotesque.

Created may be a misnomer. I had nothing to do with the creation of this scene--it's just a gnarly tree, not particularly old, on an open plain southwest of town, with dawn as a backdrop. But the image is eerie. If I'd ever use it for anything, it would be some kind of horror story maybe, an image to hint at something monstrous being afoot. 

All of which is not to say it isn't stunning. In a way, it is. Even memorable. But it's ingredients are memorable too, even though they couldn't be more commonplace. It's the composition that's somehow foreign, and I know why. 

The foreground, you can't help but notice, is brightly lit. I was out chasing the dawn, and I'd left my camera's little flash on; so when I took the first shot, I got a flash. What that means is that the light in this picture isn't real, isn't familiar, isn't what we see--any of us--when we spot a tree at dawn. The light that brightens the scraggly tree is phony, fake. It's abnormal. It's something I think we recognize as being impossible. 

It's eerie, just a bit horrific. Just a bit. I like it, not because it's beautiful but because it you just can't look away real quickly. You can't just thumb your way on to the next landscape. Something's eccentric about it. It's not real. Maybe the right word is that this strange photograph is bewitching. And I like that--but it's not real.

The day I took it, the morning show began with a stunning vein of unearthly reds and oranges, just a stripe that slowly opened into a theater of color. See it on that first shot? Eventually, it opened wider and taller, beautifully.

Some skies don't need foregrounds I try to give them. Some skies--morning and evening--are there own masterpieces. But me and the camera try to people them, find characters for these massive, dazzling settings. 

The thing is, out here in the country, mid-winter especially, finding subjects for a foreground isn't particularly easy. No matter. In a big showy dawn like this one, everything--absolutely everything--get clothed in elegance. Even a line fence is dressed for the occasion.

I like that idea. At dawn--not just any dawn either, but the ones that really step out in radiance--at dawn, it seems as if all the world is redeemed. Can I use that word? 

It's bleak mid-winter, there's nothing on the horizon of this shot that's anything close to alive, a weed patch. Down deep beneath the frost line, there's some roots with some play in them, I'm sure. But what's here above ground is all dead.

Dawn doesn't care. It bestows definition, gives weeds a radiance I'm sure they love.

The skeleton of a sunflower seems almost to be singing.

Some sod-busters called cottonwoods like this one nothing more than weeds. With the dawn behind it, there's a prairie here everyone but rarely takes the time to love. It's just plain gorgeous.

There are mornings when dawn doesn't require a flash. The Yanktons, who used to live here before the white folks came, had it right: dawn opens us to awe. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Frost like ashes

“He spreads the snow like wool 

and scatters the frost like ashes.” Psalm 147

I wouldn’t wish the apocalypse on anyone. I’ve never been particularly attracted to stories or novels or films that pitch survivors into the living hell of post-nuclear-holocaust madness, or a world sprung out of orbit by some errant heavenly asteroid. I’ve got enough anxiety; I don’t more than I have, especially when it rises from a burned-out world I simply don’t want to imagine.

But I loved Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which is pure and unadulterated apocalypse vivdly—unrelentingly--evoked.  

Something’s happened, what—we don’t know. Maybe ten years before the story begins, the world went up in smoke, triggering mass starvation. Those few who’ve stayed alive spend their days and nights foraging for food and clothing, fuel and shelter, trying to stay alive in a nightmare. Many do the unimaginable to keep breathing.

Fire must have raged everywhere, because no matter where the story brings us, the landscape is gray and wan; even snow seems ashen. Sullied rain falls throughout the novel, the color green is no more. A vast conflagration must have reigned. Nights are dark as pitch, but there is a day, even though the sun is shrouded. There are few shadows.

A man and his boy are pushing a shopping cart, walking south to the coast in search, it seems, of warmer weather. We don’t really know why they are on the road—perhaps because there was nothing left where they’d been able to stay alive. The mother is gone, having taken her own life for reasons which are clear and even forgivable. Hunger—starvation—has created monsters in human form. All along the way, the boy distinguishes his father from the “bad guys” around them by his father’s promise never to eat another human being. Yet, amid the wretchedness, we understand how tenuous that pledge is. Such is life down the agonizing emptiness of The Road.

           

The novel is a kind of prophecy, but it’s prophetic in a way that has nothing to do with politics. It is not a Jeremiad. Cormac McCarthy is not warning his countrymen and women of the decline of American prosperity or freedom. The scenario is nightmare, but there’s no agenda—political or environmental or cultural.

What the novel is more than anything, I believe, is fable. For despite its bitter horrors and beastly characters, its desolate world and desolated environment, love triumphs. It’s not possible to say what I mean in those very words—love triumphs—because anything we might connect to that phrase—that subject and that verb—seems empty and clichéd. What shines through the devastation is respect and trust; what triumphs in the ruins is love.

The Road begs you to have faith, to believe that even in the darkest of our possibilities, there can be light. Transcendent faith is all there is, even in the apocalypse.

I have no idea what the psalmist was imagining when he wrote that God scatters the frost like ashes, but somewhere therein is the suggestion of conflagration and sadness.

But the theme of the song the psalmist is singing is praise, praise, and more praise, his heart so full of faith he may well sing far, far better than he thinks. And that’s okay. Because I believe him, just as I do Cormac McCarthy.

Faith still sits at the heart of our every moment—yesterday, today, and tomorrow, whatever our tomorrow might be.

The faith of F. Scott Fiztgerald

A century ago, we went all in. Finally called to action, U.S. forces came to the aid of struggling Allied forces who seemed able to do nothing more than make those muddy trenches into a vile and bloody board game. What dragged us in was Germany's unrelenting commitment to submarine warfare. Even neutral nations--President Wilson did not want us in--couldn't be safe.

And then there was that missive Germany sent to our southern neighbors, begging complicity. The Kaiser wanted Mexico to take out as many Yankees as they could. When President Wilson got wind of that sorcery, he pointed the military toward the killing fields of France. 

Who would have believed, a hundred years ago, that after November of 1918, that we would stumble into a decade of moral laxity like none other in this country's short history. What followed were "the Roaring Twenties," when, preachers in my people's history might well have said "all hell broke loose,"  had they dared to use the world hell that loosely. Decadence. Worldliness. Flappers. Speakeasys--an exuberant, flamboyant culture danced it way through America's middle-class, white culture. 

No single writer better captured that era than Minnesota's own F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Great Gatsby is, right now, jammed somewhere in a ten million school backpacks, I'm sure. Fitzgerald knew very well what he might have considered decadence, was a part of it both here and in Europe. He partied hard, and the books he wrote captured what scores of cultural observers might have considered the end of American puritanism.

Mike St. Thomas, writing in Commonweal, reviews a new biography, David S. Brown's  Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and commends Brown for the angle he takes, a specific religious angle.  "A historian by trade, Brown argues for Fitzgerald’s status as a cultural critic who charted the decline of America from the high ideals of the nineteenth century to the “soulless materialism” of the twentieth." Borne along within that decline, Mr. St. Thomas would include the deterioration of the authority of the church during the era.

Fitzgerald dropped his boyhood Irish Catholicism in 1917, or so the story goes. But Mr. Brown insists that it never really left him, although he may well have left it. "The moral urgency found in [Fitzgerald's] writing," St. Thomas claims, "bears witness to the faith from which he could never quite escape."

People who love Flannery O'Connor often think of her and her world as being "God-haunted," and it is. Marvelous miracles arise from the mystic red soil of the American South. But if Mr. St. Thomas is right, then Brown would have us believe--and I have no trouble doing it--that Fitzgerald, despite his claims to have left the faith, was himself "God-haunted."

Somewhere in the book of Proverbs, the Bible makes a radical claim that will never disappear from wherever it's inscribed in the synapses of my brain: "Train up a child in the way he [or she] should go, and he [or she] will never depart from it." Some claim the Jesuit boast about children is a rehash: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man." That's what I read here.

And then there's this: "Believe the tale, not the teller," an old maxim of literary studies that wants readers to pay primary attention to what the story says about the writer, because the story she writes is always a more telling indicator of what she believes than what she might tell people she believes--the story's the thing in which to catch the conscience of the writer. 

Anyway, I found both Mr. St. James's review not only helpful but encouraging, taking to heart--as it does--old promises that I'll never forget--and perhaps more importantly, can't. Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald may well have thought he left the church in 1917, but the church--and all that that word entails--never left him.

I like that. Rings true.

Bud and Dode and death in LeBeau

Started out as a trading post named after the man who decided, right then and there, to do some business, Antoine LeBeau, a Frenchman, like so many trappers and traders of his time. In 1875, he put up his business on the east side of the Missouri River, just across from the Cheyenne River Reservation, and started in trading furs, pots, pans, and whatever his customers, white and red, thought worth buying and selling. After statehood, the place was called, as you can imagine, LeBeau, South Dakota.

Just five years later, LeBeau had come into its own--sixty buildings and a population of some 250, which doesn't sound like much but back then was just about half a metropolis. White folks were streaming into the region. Things were booming. 

Then, for a time, when the railroad decided to push its line slightly south, and the cowboys who'd used LeBeau before, started moving their massive herds and taking all kinds of LeBeau business with them. Little town gasped for breath.

But when the railroads moved farther north (eventually, to cross the Missouri near Mobridge), Le Beau thrived again. Business returned, including Phil DuFran's saloon. 

If you think this is turning into another lawless Western, you better believe it is.

Now the cowboys who drove their cattle northward and eastward, many of them Texans, weren't Eagle Scouts. Hollywood made a ton of money on them early in the 20th century and created standard images that sometimes, at least, weren't a country mile off center. Full of dirt and dust and smelling up a storm, they could be hellions once they got released on a town. 

One of 'em, one of Murdo McKenzie's boys, Dode, lacked the requisite control his father had when it came to wild living. And you can't blame him, really. Driving cattle through the reservation "strip," as the railroad land was called, was no picnic. When finally they could get "them little dogies" on the train, they had reason to wash down whiskey and visit a few specially decorated bedrooms. 

Seems Dode McKenzie and Bud Stephens, who tended bar at Phil DuFran's saloon (I'm not making this up), had words some time in the past. Don't know what was said or done, but the feuding wasn't over, was nowhere near to being behind 'em. They weren't on speaking terms, to put it lightly. 

One day Stephens got warned that Dode McKenzie was coming into town, packing some mischief in his belt. You know the story. Bad blood.

Stephens was ready. Dode marched in the Phil DuFran's saloon, and the bartend let him have it right in the chest with the piece he was wielding. Twice. Dode staggered back out the door, fell down the steps to DuFran's saloon and spilled out into the dust of main street, where Bud Stephens, having stepped outside, blasted him again. And again. True story. Or at least, that's the way they tell it.

Don't know if LeBeau ever had a Boot Hill, but if they did and Dode's there, it was Bud Stephens who put him in the ground.

In March of 1910, in a nearby town where the only possible jurors were homesteaders, who, on principle, hated cowpokes, Bud Stephens went to trial for the murder of Dode McKenzie. Dodie's old man, Murdo, hired a hot shot lawyer, and Bud Stephens grabbed a kid out of Mobridge, barely old enough for sideburns. But the kid pulled it off and beat the fancy pants lawyer, so Bud Stephens walked away (as far as he could get from LeBeau, South Dakota). 

Now Murdo McKenzie, who'd lost a son, was hot as a branding iron. He made sure people knew that he would never, ever again run cattle from his vast, west river empire through the dad-gummed lousy streets of LeBeau, South Dakota.

So LeBeau died. It was that simple. End of story. No more cattle; no more business. Phil DuFran left town again, started salooning elsewhere, I suppose.

You can't go to LeBeau anymore, and it's too bad. The whole thing would make one heckuva tourist attraction, don't you think, a scraggly collection of unpainted frame shacks with false fronts down a dusty main street, a bar with swinging doors, here and there tumbleweed, some cowboy falling out into the street, all bloody, a bartender plugging him.

But these days, LeBeau, South Dakota, is a cowboy Atlantis. What's left of the trading post or the cow town or even the famous saloon might be nothing more than a few scattered foundations here and there, because all of that lies perfectly still under the sparkling waters of Lake Oahe. If you want to see anything at all of the old town, strap on scuba or wait for drought.

Maybe that's a good thing. There's lot of room out there on the prairie, lots of open space for an imagination to roam. Lots of tales to tell, LeBeau being just one of 'em.

Book Report: Small Great Things

I'm green with envy. I wish I could write like Jodi Picoult, who has churned out a novel a year for the last couple of decades, and done so very well, gathering millions of readers. The places she haunts are no more exotic than your and my family rooms. Her conflicts are not at all extraordinary, except in the way that really good writers can make the ordinary, extraordinary--she gets in there between moms and daughters, between husbands and wives. In a way all of her books are about "small great things."

And some, like her newest, Small Great Things, are about issues, maybe more about issues than about characters. Small Great Things is about an African-American nurse who's worked in a nursery for twenty years. Picoult's first chapter establishes not only her competence but her commitment, her sense of calling. Ruth Jefferson knows babies--let's put it that way. And we love her.

Into the ward comes a couple, skinheads, who see Ruth Jefferson as an African-American--well, as a n______, the enemy. They tell the supervisor they won't have that woman touching their baby. The setup is almost too neat: soon, an delivery room emergency thrusts Ruth Jefferson into a position where she simply must care for the skinhead baby, the baby goes into cardiac arrest, and dies. Turk, the skinhead father, sees Ruth being physical on the dying baby, trying to save her life. He assumes the worst, and we've got a story. 

Small Great Things a perfect book for travelling, so engaging you can't quite not listen, but so breezy that it doesn't steal your attention away from where it should be--on the road. On Monday, we were spellbound for the three hours and more it took for us to drive north for friends and olebollen (to die for). The novel is great and thoughtful entertainment.

Picoult uses three voices to tell the story--Ruth, Turk, and Kennedy, Ruth's rich-white-girl lawyer. And, like just about every storyteller in her genre--and mine--Picoult goes out of her way to be sure that none of the major characters is all good or all bad. Well, at least not all-bad. Turk is a racist pig, a scum bag, a bloody bigot; but, the kid had an awful childhood. He virtually worships his wife, and the baby? When it's born, it could just as well have been born in a manger--you know? When it dies, all hell breaks loose.

Picoult does just about everything in her power to humanize the guy, and because she does, I find Turk a little bit too hard to believe. I can't really suspend my disbelief for a reason that I'll try to summarize this way: any man  (or woman) who can love that well, that deeply, can't hate that much. I don't believe Turk.

Small Great Things does great things by dragging us directly into the racial mess that exists in this country, and it does so with a familiarity that is both disarming and engaging. The Reverend Al Sharpton makes an unmistakable appearance, even though Picoult gives him a different name.

But whenever Turk talks, my defenses rise because, right or wrong, I have trouble believing that someone that smart could be that hateful. 

"There are good people on both sides," our President said after the tragedy at Chancellorsville some months ago. Bigots are good people too, he might have said. Maybe he's right. Maybe I'm wrong. 

Maybe if I knew Turks, I'd think this one less of an animal for his reeking bigotry. Maybe my politics outfit me with blinders. 

I wish I could write like Jodi Picoult. Small Great Things was an absolutely great travel companion. It moves our culture's problems with race up front and personal. It would make a great classroom novel.

But I don't believe it. Maybe I should, but I don't.

Happy New Year? Sure.

Look, can you blame me? It's the early morning of the seventh straight day I've been in the sloppy grip of a lingering, bad-ass cold (excuse my French). First, my throat went all sandpaper and my watery swollen peepers became the victims of something akin to pinkeye. That cold took over my glands, who then took over my throat. It swept down and hacked-up my lungs, and now, this morning, is assaulting me with that slimy refuse colds always kick up. This morning, balled-up Kleenex are taking over the few empty spaces beside this keyboard.

Outside, it's the world's coldest day. What's more, weathercasters claim it'll stay this well-below-zero way through several more lock-downs. The furnace runs unremittingly, and this sweet house--it's still new--scares you when random timbers on the north side scream as they freeze. 

That crooked Christmas tree outside my window--it's fake, a freebee from our kids--has to be taken in because once the "Silent Night" has passed, keeping all the ritual regalia up seems tacky, don't you think? Well, I do. Besides, that old cast-off leans like Pisa in the dark backyard. Twice it tumbled over in the brutal wind, and that happened when a human being could actually be outside, walk around without coming back fingerless. 

Whose idea was it anyway to have a "new year," as if this morning were any different from any other? Today's Monday, tomorrow's Tuesday--what's the big deal? Bowl games? So what if the sun appears a minute earlier? Of seems to, because it doesn't. Our whole planet just twisted a couple of inches. It's all perception. Besides, Donald J. Trump is still President. Holiday, you say? 

The whole idea of "a new year" is arbitrary, just fake news, a come on to get people to flock to Time Square and pop corks anywhere and everywhere. Holiday merchandising. Consumerism. "Auld Lang Syne?" Give me a break. 

I never made a resolution in my life that I remember, except the one about losing weight. . .but it doesn't take a calendar date for me to swear on that score. I did it just last weekend after being forced to weigh in at the clinic. I was there for a demon cold. Did I tell you about that? Had it a week already. Just the pits.

"New Year," you say? Bah, humbug. 

What I really need is a belly-full of oliebollen. 

Maybe that'd do it. Just my share of oliebollen. Maybe a new box of Kleenex would help too, but, Lord a'mighty, on this very first day or yet another year, please pass the oliebollen. 

Ring out the old, fry up the new. 

Happy New Year from the deep-freeze. I'll start that diet tomorrow. I will.