Me and bad news ads

I'll admit that when it comes to this incredible machine in front of me, I mostly stumble along like some stooge, knowing only what I have to keep my nose to the digital grindstone. This Dell will do a gadzillion tasks I don't know a thing about, but if someone were to show me the brave new world I'm missing, I'd forget the route inside of a day and a half anyway. 

There's this, for instance. Lately, these ads appear with annoying regularity. Mostly they try to grab my attention in the hallowed old way of the National Enquirer, spouting juicy stuff. at the grocery counter. This particular one simply assumes I'm all agog at royalty. I'm not. Princess Meghan is fetching--I get that; and I think there's some chatter about whether or not she and her sister-in-law hit it off, but I don't need her foibles in my life so I stay away (Oh, yeah, her dad's a jerk too, right?). 

But until I swipe it away, a couple times a day ornery pop-up headlines appear in the lower right-hand corner of my screen. I didn't ask for it, but then I don't doubt some errant keystroke of mine may have given it birth. "theweathercenter.org" it says for some reason I don't know. And Google Chrome. Maybe once an hour some celebrity--just now Steve Harvey (who's Steve Harvey?) will show up beneath the same title: "Sad news for. . ." I guess "enquiring minds want to know."

I don't. 

But the approach is arresting. It's always "sad news for," or some browbeaten equivalent. Here's one:  



Never cared much for the Clintons, and I'm certainly not going to start right now. 

Whoever dreams these things up and wedges them into my daily grind wants me to push that little green button. Well, I won't. But that doesn't stop the ads from jumping up out of nowhere to bless me with their gift of sad news.

What I can't help wondering is what ad guru determined that me and a million others would click on "sad news," as if we were hungry for someone/anyone to say something really dismal about some starlet's rocky marriage? Who thinks of these come-ons anyway, and who do they think we are? 

Here's my theory. Some Silicon Valley wonderboy's logarithm long ago determined my age. Whoever did, creates these things with this premise: I'm an old fart, prone to exasperation with a world I no longer understand. He thinks I'm as useless as a cream separator and therefore get pouty, prone to indigestion and the kind of windy exhortations one hears only in the minor prophets. I'm 70 years old and a pessimist--we all are. I get these blasted ads because I'm old. If I were 19 or 29 or even 49, I'd be on a whole different listing. Maybe I'd get bosomy females, but I wouldn't get a chorus of sad news takes.

How about this?



Only old farts think much about flushing their bowls. Someone with loads of money honestly believes I'm charmed by this stuff. Someone thinks I'll click on the darkness because at three-score-and-ten, real light has gone out of my life. Someone believes I love sad news. 

Well, I don't, dang it. Bring on the bosoms. 

On the birthday of MLK*

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. 



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.
_____________________________
* First published a year ago. One additional story: yesterday, Iowa Fourth District Congressman, Steve King, who has, for years, said things most people thought racist, was yesterday stripped of his committee assignments by his own Republican party. Racism isn't gone, but many of us can celebrate that his own colleagues eventually had enough of his race-baiting.

Green Book: a review

Just in case you haven't seen it, let me say that Green Book is a marvelously entertaining movie. It's won all kinds of accolades and is an almost certain Oscar nomination. 

The story is in that ad picture above. It's the Fifties, and there's this New Yawk Italian stallion, a street tough, an enforcer, who's out of a job. As unlikely as it sounds, he gets himself hired by this super-educated African-American musician who wants to tour the Jim Crow South. A highly accomplished concert pianist, the man is an artist who deliberately puts himself in a region where rich white people delight in his Rachmaninoff but detest his race.

There will be trouble, and there is.

The story is episodic, one concert appearance lined up after another; all firmly set in America's racial history. Even though today we like to think Jim Crow is gone, racism isn't--witness our own Fourth District King. But Green Book is not just about history or racism or politics or hate. It's about two human beings who begin the pilgrimage one way, and end it another. The events of the world they experience change both of them, and there lies the trouble.

This marvelously entertaining movie has taken some shots it probably earns. Some feel it's just another story of how white people save black people, a cliche, a stereotype in and of itself. Some think it melodramatic, overdone, sappy--its travel stops deliberately underplayed to keep white audiences happy. Some claim it's just plain too cute, another Disney movie.

I loved it. Then I read the negative stuff and felt guilty that I did. 

The two men at the heart of things are instantly recognizable characters. Tony Lip (Viggo Mortenson) is a Mafia thug from a thoroughgoing racist part of town. Dr. Don Shirley is something of a diva, a Black man sworn to break through racial barriers but, by his own life experience, somewhat estranged from ordinary black folks--or their world. When the story begins, both are tenderfoots who, in the trip they take, have to come to grips with the limitations they carry but don't or can't acknowledge or even understand.

Green Book features two dynamic characters, two human beings who have to suffer before they grow. They do--both of them. Just one of the strengths of the movie is that their individual growth happens simultaneously. Their journey through Dixie hatred pays real benefits to both the white chauffeur and the black virtuoso. They both learn--and from each other.

And that makes Green Book into a human drama, not just a racial drama. And that characterization, to some, makes the movie feel like a Mardi Gras mask, a delightful smile to cover the grim darkness of American bigotry, its systemic racism. Because it makes us laugh when we should be crying, some consider Green Book to be fairy tale falsehood.

I'm white. I don't have a doubt in the world that if I were black I would see things differently, but I thought it was a terrific movie, a joy--and there lies the nature of the attack on the film: the racial problems this country faces are not a joy. 

Green Book showcases well-earned racial reconciliation. Ironically, and sadly, it has also come to illustrate the very problems it wants to address, specifically how difficult racial reconciliation actually is.

It's a beautiful piece of work that'll have you laughing and crying, doing what movies are meant to do. If you don't know Jim Crow, you can't leave the theater without witnessing a history lesson on what it was. 

But if you think all of that is behind us, you're dead wrong. Witness the controversy. Green Book may well be nominated for an Oscar, but don't look for it to win. 

We've not put the problems it addresses and creates behind us. That'll be some time.

Sunday Morning Med--God's language

“There is no speech or language 

where their voice is not heard” Psalm 19 

“Israel’s singer of songs”—that’s what old King David called himself just a chapter or two before he died. If it wouldn’t be for the medley of great tunes rising from every Bible printed on earth, we might think the old monarch a bit forward about his abilities. But the Psalms speak for themselves. As do the heavens, the triumphant subject of Psalm 19.

You can feel David’s poetic soul here in Psalm 19, the gift which made him Israel’s greatest singer. It’s not enough for him to say that the heavens preach God’s glory. For David’s rhapsodic sensibility, it’s not enough to sing out the joy of knowing that heavenly sermon is aired, literally, day after day. He’s on to a truly divine idea here, and the poet in him is not about to let go. He’s thrilled. He’s awed.

What he might have said in verse three is that there is no nation or tribe where the voice of the heavens is not heard. He might have said there is no city or town, no country or habitation where the sky can’t sing God’s praise. But Israel’s best singer lovingly tweaks that savored metaphor one more time and says that there is no speech or language where God’s heavenly word isn’t there just for the listening. God’s awesome heavens speak his glory in every last human tongue.

There’s no Babel of languages here, no multi-culturalism, no quilt of ethnics. The sky creates a divine melting pot all over the world because everyday, on every square inch of the globe, people can hear God’s glory preached in a language that has no verbs or nouns or retained objects. That’s what’s astounding. That’s what makes him sing out the glor again and again.

What Psalm 19 offers is truly radical theology. God speaks by way of Orion, the Big Dipper, and a harvest moon. His sermon is the dawn, the dusk, and searing heat of midday. He’s speaks, every minute of our lives, in a language we might simply call azure.

What is at once most amazing and most triumphant is God’s true democratic disposition, the fact that his word surrounds all of us every day. Out here beneath the open skies of the prairie he preaches divinely, let me tell you; but the grace of his word is accessible absolutely anywhere, to all tribes and all nations—even to our enemies.

Not long ago I listened to a woman from Laos tell a frightening story of her escape across the Mekong River. Five adults swam alongside a boat barely bigger than my desk, a leaky little skiff that filled with river water just about as fast as the children inside could bale it out. She prayed and prayed and prayed for deliverance, she said.

Only recently had she become a Christian. When I asked her who she was praying to in those years before she knew the Lord, she told me that she didn’t really know—not even then, up to her neck in the waters of Mekong. She says she didn’t know who was listening.

Now she does, she told me. Now she knows Jesus Christ.

On that scary night on the river, I’m guessing that she was praying to whoever it was she’d heard in the sermons preached by the sky. And I’m thinking—and I certainly want to believe—that preacher, the Lord God almighty, was listening.  

Morning Thanks--Union/Dunkard

"Asleep in Jesus"

Two years ago I stumbled on an old unkempt cemetery, miles from any main road, surrounded by Iowa corn. Few stones remained upright, many were gone. But the stones that were there and still readable told an incredible story of children and tragic death, and I knew at that moment that a significant, unrecorded human drama had once occurred here, far from the cities, at this isolated spot in the garden of America. 

That's a chunk of the first paragraph of my first book, published just about forty years ago. We'd been out to eat somewhere with my in-laws, and were traipsing around the country where my father-in-law grew up when we happened on this ancient graveyard, a place far more distinguishable for what wasn't there than what was, just a few stones hither and yon, all of them leaning precariously.

But I knew also that just as the stones themselves had been lost, many of the old stories would not last the passing of a generation, unless someone tried to give them the life they deserved, not only as interesting tales, but also for the strength they illustrated and the wisdom they carried.

I didn't take any pictures back then, but it seemed to me yesterday, when I walked around out there again for the first time in forty years, that there may well have been more stones back then. Several are toppled, some grown over with weeds, whatever name they carried or remembered long ago undiscoverable.

The kids out there still chills the soul. Of the readable few, there's lots of children. 

"AGED 7 Ys.  11Ms. 3Ds

"Children of Chas and Mrs.(?) French

"The angels called him."

Annie Dau. of E.W. and M.Willey Born Dec. 7 1887 Died Aug. 23, 1888

There are more, but there's this one too.

Just "Infant"

Forty years after that first visit, at least I know the name--Union/Dunkard cemetery. Its constituency, like its populace, has vanished. No one's left to regard what's out there. No one puts out flowers in late May. What's knowable about anyone out here diminishes with every passing season. 

The "Union" in the name signifies this hallowed ground holds a Civil War vet. Maybe this man, Aaron Willey.

It's the Union/Dunkard Cemetery because a Dunkard church once stood not far away, the German Baptist Church of Pleasant Valley, a fellowship who came and left in less than thirty years. 

 

Union/Dunkard, like so many country graveyards sits up on a knoll, as if communication between this world and the next were somehow aided by elevation. The sun was shining, but there was nothing to slow a persistent numbing wind out of the southeast. It was cold out there for an hour or so. No one came by.

Forty years ago, the nameless graveyard was a place full of stories. I was younger I'd hear them if I'd read and listen. I'm less sure now, all these years later. But then, I'm 70 and soon to have a birthday. 

These days there's nothing around Union/Dunkard but hogs, all of them inside, out of the wind, temperature controlled, hundreds of them in two neighboring confinements. The people who once lived there--and their descendants--are gone, and along with them, the stories they knew and told. What's left is a jumble of stones, the only straight line, the horizon far, far away.

Funerals are strange things. You cry your eyes out, then, a minute later, laugh and sing with a gorgeous conviction. Forty years later, out there Union/Dunkard was cold and unwelcoming, barely an upright stone to be found, a dozen unreadable, and it'll only get worse. 

But if there was a better spot to be yesterday in Sioux County, Iowa, I wouldn't have known it. I loved being out there alone, mid-morning--which is why I can say that this morning I'm thankful for the place, wind-driven and uninviting as it was and is. It was a good place to visit, a good place to be.

Morning Thanks--a mentor

Every kid had a choice, probably still do. For their final year of catechism, every kid in our church could choose to have a mentor, or to attend a class. Back then, twenty years ago or so, one of the kids said he'd like a mentor--me. 

I should have been pleased, should have been proud. At the time, I was teaching, full-time. I don't remember exactly, but I'm sure I had to have been a little proud. The kid chose me, after all.

So we started. He came to our house one Sunday morning, and we talked, came up with a curriculum, the Heidelburg Catechism, a foundation of the church and denomination we were a part of, then started the next week with the first q and a. 

Many years before, an editor had asked me to team up with a theologian and write a book of meditations for middle-schoolers. Didn't seem tough. The theologian chose the passages and sent me overviews. It was my job to make those ideas sing. Back then, our own kids were that age. 

I soloed on a few more books, little ones, all of which did relatively well. After a couple of hundred meditations, you get accustomed to the genre. Writing devotions for kids wasn't particularly difficult, and what I wrote somehow found enough of an audience that what I did was worth my time--and theirs presumably.

So when this kid wanted me to mentor him, and we decided on content, I wandered back into the genre I knew quite well. I sat down and wrote meditations for some time, walked and wrote my way through the whole Heidelburg Catechism. What I wrote came out some time later--a book, devotions for teens. That's it, up top.

That was 2001. I know it got read; sometimes I even heard from happy readers--let me correct that: "the folks of happy readers." Maybe I should say "happy folks of kids." But I'm proud of it--was then, still am. When you write something like that, you're in it, and I am. Today, it's shelf life is well behind it. It's up here on my shelf along with a ton of other books that are long out-of-print. 

Well, I take that back. I just looked. Amazon has one left. Better hurry!

Yesterday I got a request from a broadcast ministry I used to know quite well, The Back to God Ministries, who would like to translate the Every Bit into Chinese and eventually run it on line, a e-book, free to gadzillions of Chinese speakers around the world.

Eighteen years ago, two of us sat in our living room on those Sunday mornings. He'd have read the Heidelburg q and a on tap that day--plus a meditation or two I'd written. And we'd talk--I hope all of that did some good, my year as a mentor.

Every Bit of Who I Am is a book, like so many others I'd written in the basement of a hundred-year old house in a small town in the northwest corner of Iowa. Soon enough, technology will outfit those ideas in a whole new wardrobe, an ancient language, then put those words up in a screen the whole world can see. 

Through nothing less than an act of God, those words will be out there once more looking for a continent of new readers, all of which makes this morning's thanks a slam dunk, doesn't it? Nobody's coming to our house. We don't even live there anymore. But I'm still a mentor.

I'm awed really, awed and very thankful.

Morning Thanks--Mouse beans

"I loved working with my grandma in the garden," she told me. "Sometimes we'd pick potato bugs off the plants. And mouse beans too--she'd take me along when she'd gather mouse beans." That memory seemed to jar her, the way almost-forgotten moments can when they suddenly reappear. "Nobody ever talks about mouse beans anymore." Seemed almost a mystery to her.

She was a little girl when her grandma died, and that was two years after her mother passed away, which means she grew up without either of the two most important women in her life. Her father was devoted and strong, she says, determined to keep his children together after their losses. But she says he used to tell her, his oldest daughter, that there was so much he, a white man, couldn't teach her because she'd lost two beloved Lakota women while she was still a child.

"So how is it that nobody talks about mouse beans?" 

My job, the writer, is to answer that question. It's amazing what a little research can uncover. 

Once upon a time mouse beans were a staple of the Sioux people, so much a favorite that Lakota women would sing songs for the gathering, songs passed on through generations of mouse bean harvesters.

In an article in Indian Country Today, Mary Annette Pember, who teaches ethno-biology at Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation, says gathering mouse beans was once an honored seasonal task, even though today what was once done ritually seems, well, disgusting. Lots of mature beans could be found in the nests of field mice. Gathering them from those nests made the work considerably easier than digging them in less volume from the soil where they grew. 

Mouse beans grow from a vining plant in the bean family, an annual that is both common and unique. It looks very much like poison ivy and is often considered a weed. Because it produces not just one but two "beans" or fruit, one of which is above ground, the other beneath, it quite unusual. For many tribes, hog peanuts--mouse beans--were a common, healthy food source, high in protein, low in fat.

Professor Pember says that through the years gathering mouse beans became a seasonal cultural event, "a ceremony in which the women first sang beautiful songs of their intent to take some of the rodent’s harvest.” The songs honored the mice. They “asked for the mice’s permission to open their caches and reassured them that they would leave enough beans for them to survive the winter.” But those songs also "included words of thanks and honoring for the animals.” Frequently, Professor Pember says, those who harvested mouse beans left dried meat and fruit behind.

Gathering mouse beans was lost to the people along the Missouri River, when Pike-Sloan created four dams that changed the river forever. The rich gumbo soil beneath the trees at the banks disappeared, and along with it went not only the native beds of mouse beans, often called “hog peanuts." Music and ritual that gave life and meaning to everyday experience of the people have virtually disappeared.

That last paragraph might well make white folks shrug their shoulders. "Isn't that just the way things go?" they'd say. Native people from along the Missouri River might well use the very same words with a whole world of different meaning.

This morning I'm thankful--but sad--about mouse beans and hog peanuts.

Het Loo

We’d just passed the bridge at Nijmegen where, 600 yards to the west, hundreds of GIs paddled flimsy Brit boats with their rifle butts in order to cross a river flowing with current fast enough to knock you off your feet. What’s worse, all kinds of Nazi armaments were fixed and firing on them—and what’s even worse, it was daytime.

Somehow, some made it to the other side—about half with the first contingent. The other half perished. Somehow, they established a beachhead, then went on to take the bridge, if you can believe it, only to be joined by Brit tanks. But those tanks shut down. They were ordered not to go on.

The story goes that the commander of this miniature D-Day near-suicide mission was so incensed at their failure to move—he’d lost tons of his men because he knew Allied troops up river at Arnhem were pinned down and needed help badly—the man was so incensed that what he said to the Brits, having tea, really can’t be repeated.

And that’s the story I was thinking about—the whole story of Operation Market Garden—when we rolled up to Het Loo, the summer palace of the Dutch Royal Family, a monumental national treasure hidden neatly in the woods.

I will never understand royalty. I am too much an American. I have few links to the patriots who signed the Declaration of Independence, and I don’t really share their deep hatred for royalty either. I just don’t understand the whole concept—I’m too much a yankee, for better or for worse.

So I wasn’t impressed by Het Loo. Which is not to say it was hard to be impressed; after all, the place is stunning. There are so many Golden Age paintings on those walls that some visitors—I’m sure not all—get a headache. You could spend all day in any one of that mansion’s rooms and not see everything. Riches galore are on each wall, each ceiling, each floor.

Okay, I was impressed, but not enchanted. Opulence, after all, is by definition elitist. If you don’t mind asserting that some people are simply created more equal than others, then what you see in the royal palace is just wonderful. Okay.

But I got tired, fast. And I got to thinking that if I was the first lieutenant who’d just lost half his men in crossing the river and taking Nijmegen bridge, and if I just happened to stumble into Het Loo, just down the road, my uniform still stinking of river water, my hands still shaking from picking up the bodies of my men out of the river—if I just walked into all that opulence after all that death, I’d sit down and cry. I wouldn’t even swear. I’d just cry.

Maybe the two, juxtaposed the way they were today, were just too dissonant: the horrors of war and stench of riches. I wish I hadn’t been thinking about a hundred dead men.

Het Loo rules say no pix, but I just wanted one and I got it. This one. Contraband. Ten seconds later, a youthful guide reminded me that no cameras were permitted. I felt like asking him if he had any idea how much American blood was forever sewn in his country’s soil.

This is a bedroom, a tiny one. Multiple the opulence here by about twenty or so--well, how about fifty, and you have Het Loo. The place was impressive, but I was not enchanted because I have no history with endearing royal families. I’ve never sworn allegiance to a king or queen, and I don’t know what it’s like to live with a Queen Mother. I don’t get it. To me, a king or queen is just something other, just something other.

And then I came on a room upstairs where, in the corner, quite unobtrusively, a table stood, stacked with books, books about the Dutch Resistance in the Second World War. In addition, a couple of photographs stood there, one of them a group of six Dutch men, members of the underground, the other a woman who was herself deeply immersed in resistance work.

Two delft plates inscribed with Dutch words stood on that table—Al ware doot op de lippen daerommie moet men geen couragie verliegen, one of them said: “Even when death is very near there is no reason to lose courage.”

There was nothing gaudy about that table, no antiquities traceable to Holland’s Golden Age. It was little more than a black table holding aging books and a couple of framed mementos.

The Queen put it there, a note said. The Queen insisted that table be there, amid all the paunchy Rubens women, the darkened portraits of rich noblemen and their plump little high-collared children, amid enough tapestry to cover the walls of the Corn Palace three times over.

But that table was enough to alter my perceptions a bit, to understand why women I know who were in Holland in 1940, who suffered through an awful five-day war and the incineration of Rotterdam--why those women were heartbroken when Wilhelmina left the Netherlands for Britian, why those women felt abandoned, or so they told me, why they had real trouble not being furious.

They loved their queen, which is something I have always had trouble understanding.
But that ordinary table, amid all the splendor, the antiquities, the riches—that table, put there on the insistence of Queen Wilhelmina, that table told me that this wasn’t just any queen either, but someone who was, without a doubt, blessed with a heart for her people.

That table and those pictures and that single sentence helped this ugly American appreciate Het Loo.

Morning Thanks--Country school teachers

“ONCE more the country is appalled at the reports of widespread death and misery in the northwest; but in its range and destructive intensity this cold wave surpasses all hitherto recorded.”

So wrote Will A. Wells, the editor of the Alton Democrat on February 4, 1888, just three weeks after an immense January blizzard people began to call “the Children’s Blizzard.” In a column titled “As to the Blizzard,” he looks back on the storm that, on January 12, killed hundreds of people, many of them children, “over all the plains and prairies from the Rocky Mountains to the timbered hills along the Mississippi.” That monster storm turned beast and killer. “Travelers buried under the snow, farmers dying within a few rods of their own doors, children frozen stiff on the way home from school, and domestic animals dying by thousands; and following the cold in western Kansas there is starvation, till whole families are said to be perishing in their frail cabins.”

It was a huge and horrible story. People--many of them children--perished. Some bodies weren't recovered until spring. From Nebraska to North Dakota, from the Black Hills to the Iowa prairie, hundreds of one-room school teachers were faced with a decision that threatened the lives of their children, their "scholars," as people called them then.

They're all gone now, a entire multitude of young women, largely untrained, most of them still teenagers, who taught rural kids in one-room schools in the era when farms of 160-acres were huge, a time when more families peopled the land, more big families, and lots more kids. Every couple of miles there'd be a little schoolhouse, most now long gone, as are the teachers, and often enough even children.

But the Children's Blizzard put those young women at the heart of life-and-death drama played out throughout the region, and Editor Wells couldn't help but reflect on their heroism, not simply in the horrifying white-out of a Great Plains blizzard, but in the sometimes thankless tasks they took up, day after day, teaching kids aged five to fifteen years old--and sometimes older--in a single room out in the country, the one-room school. Here's what Editor Wells wrote.

The bone, sinew, brains, courage, love, light and hope of the country are embodied in those dear little blue-eyed girls, who in many instances have given up good homes and refused to live idle lives, in order that they could teach school and enlighten the minds of thousands of children who will someday be men and women, and who are paid a miserable pittance for so much hard work.

Historians fairly get enthusiastic over brave deeds of brave men; poets grow wild in praise of "the charge of the gallant six hundred," and people are enchanted by songs of knightly courtier, but in all the world—in every clime there are no class of persons so true and brave, nor so honest and good and devoted to duty as these little school teachers we see almost every day of our lives, and if we were a singer, our songs should be sung in every home throughout our land to their honor and beauty; if we were a poet, our commemorations of those brave little angels should be in every book; and if we were a historian, our annals would chronicle the bravest deeds of the century, performed by these maidens who are making our world brighter and better and purer by their lives and good examples. 

From the time the writer was a wicked and mischievous lad attending school in the long ago, the patient little blue-eyed lady, whom we annoyed, disobeyed and got spanked for it, is the same little lady we now see in sunshine and in storm, happily tripping to the school house, where she is molding the minds of the rising generation to be good men and true women. There will be a grand re-union someday, across the mystic line that divides mortal life from the beautiful one beyond, and when the Good Superintendent calls the roll, every school ma'am that ever whaled a refractory pupil will answer to her name. The devil never got a school ma'am, and never will.*

Okay, he may be laying it on a little, but I couldn't help but love those words Editor Wells couldn't help but write. My mother was one of them. She wasn't even born in 1888, but once upon time fifty years later, in a one-room school in Wilson Township, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, she held forth to a passel of country kids, a few of whom--boys!--were a good deal bigger and a lot meatier than she was.

Just about all of those schools are gone now, long gone. But even today, years later, those young teachers deserve every bit of the thanks and praise our Editor Wells gave them a century and more ago.
_____________________ 
Alton Democrat, February 4, 1888. 

A Winter's Tale from Sioux County*

Unlike many other early Sioux County immigrant families, the Mennings, so says Charlie Dyke, had some significant bucks when they left the Netherlands.  That relative wealth did not mean their passage to the new country was a piece of cake.  They were still in the North Sea when their ship collided with another.  Both sunk, and, along with them, most all of the Menning’s worldly possessions.

 

Blessedly, some freighter picked them up, brought them to Grigsby, England, from which port they left again, arriving eventually in Quebec.  Their next stop was Waupun, Wisconsin; but their true destination was Sioux County, Iowa, and a chunk of land about two miles east and one mile north of Orange City, homestead land just inside the Holland Township line.

When the Mennings got here, like the other early settlers, their first abode was literally dug out of rich Sioux County earth.  Dyke doesn’t say what the Mrs. Menning thought of mud floors, but you can guess it didn’t take a half century for them to get a frame house.  Their first was a roughshod palace—14 feet by 14 feet.  Welcome to the New World.

 

But soon enough they had friends, good friends—the Schuts—from down the road a piece.  One winter’s day the Schuts came over for a little friendly neighborliness, two families—just imagine!-- packed joyfully into a domicile 14 by 14.  That’s right neighborly.  But there’s more to the story.

Neither family had weather.com on their iPad, so when a big storm blew up out of nowhere that afternoon, they were left out in the cold, so to speak.  Now the Mennings had a kind of lean-to just big enough for their team and their two precious milk cows.  The Schuts had taken a wagon over, so they had team as well and were more than a little wary of letting those good horses out in the storm.  Alas, there was no room in the lean-to.

They had no choice but to make do, so Mr. Menning took control by putting the Schut’s horses into their make-shift barn.  Then he grabbed more than a few armfuls of straw and littered the house before leading their two precious milk cows into what was, of course, the only shelter available, the house.  Charley Dyke says that before those beefy bovines got in, they made sure whatever foodstuff happened to be around were safely stowed on the other side of  that Great Room ( 14 x 14).

So there they were—two wooden-shoed families and two gracious milk cows, all warm and snuggly in a crackerbox that was, that winter’s night, the only port in the storm.  Once Mrs. Menning milked those two friendly beasts and then pulled out some precious chocolate, the whole gathering had one enjoyable evening together in a warm house, I’m sure, drinking chocolate milk and singing their favorite psalms, an image that is, I think, something out of early Van Gogh.

Charlie Dyke doesn’t say whether the beasts knew Dutch or the psalms, so whether or not they sung with, no one will ever know.

What is clear—what is for sure—is that those immigrant folks found a way to make do.

Just another tale of neighborliness from Sioux County’s early years. 

And those were the rich ones.
_____________________________ 
Source: Charles Dyke, The Story of Sioux County. This post first published here February 13, 2012.

Immigration

I snapped this shot at the Somalia exhibit at St. Paul's Minnesota History Center. I wanted a picture of the plow, that wooden contraption in the far corner, a venerable, ox-drawn ancestor of, well, this 21-bottom plow pulled along a Big Bud behemoth, 900 horsepower, if you're counting muscle.

Imagine, for a moment, coming from the mud hut above--a typical Somalian domicile--to the massive agri-world below. That Big Bud tractor could open up more prairie ground in an hour than you could hope to see in a decade behind a sweaty team of oxen and that old wooden doohickey.

Welcome to America.

Traditionally, Somalis were largely nomadic.  They carried their shelters on camel back across a divided country that is, save for valleys and coast lines, hot and desert-like. Today, tens of thousands Somalis live in Minnesota, an unlikely adopted homeland for so many black African Muslims. Just this week, a heat wave has descended over the "land of 10,000 lakes"; temps are expected to reach the 40s. I'm not kidding. Strange weather.

Because twenty below isn't rare here. Natives take some pride in the deep freeze--"thirty below keeps out the riff-raff," some whisper. But if you're a Somali "nomadic pastoralist," accustomed to scorching heat, Minnesota must be far beyond night-marish. What's more, to black Africans, Minnesota must seem to overflow with pale faces, full of blonde Nordics, their descendants anyway. 

If blondes have more fun, Minnesota ought to be an endless party. But they're Lutheran, many of them anyway. So they know their sin, right? And yours too. They're people who've been known only occasionally to smile.

Imagine, for a moment, being a devout Muslim Somalian displaced by never-ending bloodletting in a bloody civil war that all too regularly takes the lives of people you love. Imagine escaping the danger around that round house in the museum display, leaving that thick grassy roof behind you, getting on an airplane in Mogadishu, then flying across the world, getting out the airport, and walking into the Mall of America. It's as easy to underestimate the intense struggles of immigration as it is overestimate them. Somewhere in all of us, after all, there's this desire to be free and need to be loved.

Across town Minnesota's Swedish Institute is housed in a castle in downtown Minneapolis. Seriously. I'm not making this up. Right there, downtown Minneapolis, stands a European-looking castle built to a design its wealthy owners determined they wanted to bring to Minnesota. Think I'm kidding? Look for yourself.

Swan Turnblad and his reclusive wife, Christina, wanted a bit of Europe in the Twin Cities, and they had the bucks to build it, so they did. All of that is the American Dream, really, and the Turnblads, dirt poor immigrants from Sweden, are your classic Dreamers.

Just one of the features of this castle, inside, is a gallery of immense wood carvings that are just plain stunning. See for yourself.

It's an incredible piece of work, four-feet tall, cutting a sort of suspiciously randy pose, a Neptune-like bearded man with one arm sweetly up over his head like a flirtatious starlet, the other holding back a breech cloth we'd just as soon not see fall. There's probably intent in this art, some abiding moral, but I didn't care to stick around to discover what meaning it carries.

Right there beside it in front room, where you ascend the stairs, you'll find a couple of weighty banister carvings that feel classical, but are meant, our tour guide told us, as symbols--a pair of lions outfitted with eagle's wings. 

They were deliberately ordered up by the Turnblads and carved out by some old country craftsman to represent the world as Turnblads knew it. What they wanted was something to combine the cultures they loved--American eagles and Swedish lions. 

Makes for unlikely front room greeters.

They came from nothing, the Turnblads. What must be said is that Christina Turnblad's very first job, in Worthington, Minnesota, paid no salary whatsoever, no wage, no money. She and her parents had less than nothing when they came to this country, so the best she could do--with no English, no education, and no work experience--was on-the-job training in a hotel, where she was given room-and-board for endless toil that promised her this much at least: the work would teach her how to become a good domestic. 

She and her husband built a castle in Minneapolis and ascended open stairways attended by incredible, hand-carved lions adorned with eagle's wings. 

Is it any wonder why needy people have forever arrived on our shores? And is it any wonder why so many of us have resented them, and still do, even those descendants of their own ancestors "yearning to be free?" Is it any wonder why the very first order of business in a restructured U. S. House of  Representatives will be immigration? 

It's not easy, but it's something we do and always will, as long as people dream.

Morning Thanks--Triple Espresso

We didn't do much drinking on New Years Eve. In fact, the motel bar was just closing when we came home, and it wasn't even eleven. We didn't stay up late either, although we did manage to keep our eyes open until just past midnight. 

We didn't do much partying, but we sure as heck laughed a ton--at these guys, the three stars of Triple Espresso, laugh-a-minute entertainment that has a story line, but mostly features the bedeviling antics of three slightly woebegone entertainers--a "just about" musician, a pained magician, and a comedian who's sometimes a joke more annoying than funny. On their own, they're wannabees, but when they combine forces in this hilarious show, they're Keystone Cops, the stand-ups who couldn't shoot straight.

Funny?--you wouldn't believe how. You got to be there to know. At one point I told myself I had to gather my wits because I could not stop laughing. Triple Espresso is a thousand puns and prat falls that together create a gag show that's a good deal wittier than the Three Stooges, with just as much hoopla. It is, as its title argues, highly caffeinated comedy. Moments come along when you have to remind yourself to breathe.

We saw Triple Espresso first twenty years ago, when the show went up at the Cricket Theater in Minneapolis, where it became the biggest hit in the theater's 26-year history. Neither it nor the three clowns who do it have lost a step. 

Years ago, we saw it in the Cricket because we had met one of the guys some time earlier. Through the years we kinda' stayed in touch, enough so that that we still felt that guy at the piano to be a friend. We've followed him and his wife via Facebook, watched his family grow, in fact, even through the kind of tragedy that's difficult to talk about--they lost a son to suicide. 

Watching him pull faces, listening to his character, a lounge lizard, tickle the ivories, letting him and his sidekicks entertain us--it was especially wonderful on New Years Eve, even more wonderful than it was on another frigid Minnesota night a couple decades ago when we saw the show first. This time there was more story than simply madcap hilarity on stage.

Look, Triple Espresso left us in stitches twenty years ago when we saw it, and it did so again on Monday night, in spades. We left perfectly punch drunk on New Years Eve.

But somehow, this time, it was better--just as funny, but somehow richer, knowing what we knew. Last time, it was simply hilarious. This time, New Years Eve, it was even joyful.

This morning, I'm just plain thankful for the show, and the story we saw up there on stage at the Park Square Theater on an otherwise frigid St. Paul New Years Eve.