Waiting these days

Tucked away somewhere, I have a card from my dad's doctor, a sympathy card, I believe, that includes a list of things, five or six possible causes--Alzheimer's among them--for him dying how and when he did. His death started with a painful fall that I've always thought so taxed his systems that it put his very life at risk. After that fall, he spent maybe three weeks in a hospital, "declining," as they say. 

For a few days, I kept a vigil at his side, a time I treasured then and still do, despite the fact that during those hours he never once spoke to me or even appeared to know I was there. He was restless, but seemed not to be in significant pain. 

We were 500 miles from home, and I had classes to teach--we couldn't stay indefinitely. I asked the nurses and the doctors if they could give me any guess as to when the end would come. Neither would or could, they said, because they'd seen old folks in similar conditions rally to hang around this world for weeks sometimes. "Could be tomorrow, could be next month," they said, so we left.

Just a few nights later, Dad died. I'm not given to sour stomachs, but I woke up that night, 500 miles away, something foul in me. Not until the next day, when the phone call came, did I eerily determine my strange wakefulness occurred at about the moment he died. 

Back we went to Wisconsin.

When my mother was 95, her swollen abdomen prompted a trip to the doctor's office, where, after a series of tests, the doctor told her, gently, I'm told, that her body was losing a battle against an aggressive cancer she didn't even know she had. She wasn't upset. She didn't go teary. If anything she was at peace, knowing that she'd soon be going home. 

My sister took her back to the Home. That was all on Friday. On Monday morning, with her daughter in the room along with someone else, my mother stopped breathing. They didn't even see her pass. Just like that, life was over, a sweet, sweet death--no apparent suffering. She left, calmly and without a fuss, bound for whatever Glory looks like. Still makes me smile to think of it.

We were halfway to Wisconsin, almost exactly, in fact, when my brother-in-law called to tell us, that morning, that Mom was gone. We'd been on our way home for a final visit, but I took the next freeway exit and turned back to Iowa because we knew this wouldn't be an over-nighter. We'd need to gather some things.

Not so strangely really, I remember both of my parents' deaths as a joy--death as deliverance. 

My mother-in-law's dying came after years of travail from an unrelenting nerve disease that left her dizzied, more and more incapable of standing, then sitting, then even lying down. She was in hospice care for years, her nurse a perfect angel. When finally the end was near, she was restless, seemed almost frantic. Just what those who die as she did are conscious of is a question no one can answer, but for more time than I care to remember, something inside her determinedly hung on even though she'd long ago made clear that leaving would be a blessing.

On a Sunday night we were there. Her husband was at her bedside, as he had been all day, waiting. It was exhausting to witness, so I told my wife that it might be good to go to church for an hour, to get him away--and good for us too. So the three of us left, drove to church, 
and had just sat down when my wife got the call--Mom was gone. 

Just before we left, I had taken the nurse aside and asked her if she had any guess how long it might be. "Could be tonight, could be next week," she said, or something similar. But she did edge a guess. "I'd guess that by Monday night, your mother will be gone."

Fifteen minutes later, Mom was relieved by peace.

Yesterday, the nurse smiled when I asked the same old question about Dad. "You can't tell, can you?" I said. 

She just smiled. "You just never know," she said.

My father-in-law is not eating anymore, not drinking either. He stays in bed, apparently sleeping. If it wouldn't be for heavy breathing, you could believe he is already gone. But there's sound--no rattle and not choppy--and occasionally something moves: he raises a hand to his face or a leg stirs. He too, as were all of our parents, is very much ready to go. 

Shouldn't be long. But we wait. No one knows when he'll go, so we wait, as he does, I suppose. We wait, all of us. We were alone last night. No call came.

Today is another day. We wait. 

Sunday Morning Meds--the big fires

 “He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.”

Psalm 104

The story, in Chadron, Nebraska, that summer, 13 years ago, was what the fire didn’t take. It didn’t take the town, even though it consumed huge tracks of land just south. It didn’t take a life, although hundreds of firefighters, many of them volunteers, battled it through 60,000 acres of pine forests and grasslands. It didn’t take the spirit of the place, even though it blackened and charred some of the most beautiful landscape of northwest Nebraska.

“The fire” is something of a misnomer, because “the fire” was really five separate blazes, each of them ignited by lightning in a Wednesday night storm. No careless smokers, no untended campfire, no looney pyromaniac, no disgruntled camper—all five started by lightning in a tinder box of 100-degree temps, bone-dry air, and robust winds. For a time, the largest, the Spotted Tail fire, was roaring along towards town at thirty feet per second.

By Friday night and Saturday, half the city of Chadron had evacuated, and everyone was frightened. It took three houses, but miraculously sidestepped several others before stopping on a dime behind the football field of Chadron State College—but after consuming the landmark “C” hill that overlooks the town.

The fires moved so quickly and so voraciously that the curator of the town’s Fur Trade Museum could do little but watch as firefighters stood guard. It was impossible for her to gather all the one-of-a-kind artifacts, but she was fortunate—as was the town itself, when the raging fire spared the place.

Three families—and three families only—looked at the charred remains of their country homes when it was over, nothing left but foundations. I’m sure those families find little comfort in a verse like this—praise to God for messenger winds and servant fires.

Hundreds, I’m sure, offered thanks that more wasn’t destroyed. Half a town, evacuated, probably bowed their heads in joy and relief when the raging flames backed off at the football field. For almost 72 hours in Chadron, Nebraska, who was on the Lord’s side seemed clear—it was the firefighters, battalions of them, including dozens of local construction units manning bulldozers. I’m guessing nobody prayed for the fire; nobody sided with the flames. No one saw those five fires as servants of the Most High.

Were they?

That’s the toughest question of all. Does God author our calamity?

I know this. The near catastrophe drew the people of Chadron together as loving neighbors; it humbled them and made them thankful. For months, signs around town still sing the praises of the firefighters. For three days in Chadron everything stopped, and people prayed. In just four seasons, the “C” hill was emerald, brimming with blooming new life. It’s not hard to make a case for that fire, like many others, as servant.

But three families lost everything. There is a time for everything, the preacher says, a time for silence too. And now is the not the time to put up a banner downtown Chadron that broadcasts this proud verse of praise.

It is amazing how broad and wide the Bible is, how unending, how amazing—not unlike the yawning Great Plains landscapes all around Chadron, Nebraska.

Only bigger. Much bigger. It holds all of our voices, and it has His. That big. Huge.

An August Morning in Siouxland

They're not new, but they could be. Just thought I'd look up some old photos of a Siouxland dawn, eleven years ago right about now, right about here. Whatever rural beauty they captured hasn't changed much. 

Three weeks late, I think, although I don't keep track. Anyway, it's here now, and we've had it for four of the last five meals (and there's more!)--I'm talking about sweet corn, of course, the real reason people live in the upper Midwest (according to Garrison Keillor). This isn't. But it feels like a reminder.

Morning Thanks--Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

I don't know how exactly--or who--told me I had to read Beloved. I do remember having a single copy of three Toni Morrison novels--one of them was Song of Solomon--on my shelf, but I hadn't read it by 1987, when Beloved was published. My guess is that when it won the Pulitzer, I picked it up, hardcover. Beloved got amazing press right from the start.

Some time later, Christianity Today asked me to write up a list of my favorite novels, a perfectly impossible task. Listing favorite novels is like listing favorite children--it simply can't be done. What I mean is, no book I've read recently is as memorable, as Educated, the memoir by a woman born into a tormented family, a book I'd never, ever call "a favorite." I loved The Comfort Bird, the story of two Frisian families, only one of whom immigrated to America. I loved it because I felt as if I was in it. But I don't know that I'd ever call it "my favorite novel."

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a searing story about slavery, even though it's set in Ohio, north of the Mason-Dixon, some years after the Emancipation Proclamation. At the heart of things is Sethe, a runaway slave mother who seemingly left the horrors behind, but never could. She spent her years of freedom as haunted by "the schoolteacher," her slave master, as she was by the child she murdered with her own hands when she determined that death was preferable to slavery. Beloved employs the supernatural--ghosts speak from the recesses of Lethe's haunted memories and the very heart of her guilty soul.

All of that sounds perfectly awful, I'm sure. But great literature--and I'm thinking of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead here too--creates characters of such moment that they continue to haunt a reader long after the final page, as does Toni Morrison's Sethe. When a novel takes you so deeply into a character's heart and soul, into her very humanity, that character takes on a life of his or her own--and so it is with Beloved.

The character Toni Morrison names as "Beloved" seems an embodied ghost of the child Sethe had murdered rather than have her live as a slave. That character or memory or ghost is not only difficult but a powerful and a sometimes undeniably evil force.

When finally she leaves, Sethe is heartbroken. "She was my best thing," she tells Paul D, her sometimes companion who has also suffered the horrors of slavery. And then comes the most beautiful line, a final line that shines bright as eternity from the darkness of the novel, when Paul D says, "You your best thing, Sethe."

There's lots of Beloved that's no longer fresh in my memory, but that last life-affirming line I took home.

Years ago, I watched Alex Haley's Roots and therewith began to take a deliberate look at my own heritage and history. I've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I'm well aware of how that novel opened eyes that had long been closed tight before. But Beloved is something else altogether, as primary to an understanding of slavery as Sophie's Choice is to the Holocaust.


To me, Morrison's Beloved is the book about slavery and its shameful horrors. If you want to understand the legacy of slavery, read it. It's not easy. Don't take it to the beach. She started her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech saying, "Fiction has never been entertainment for me."

No matter. Beloved may well be my favorite novel of all time.

Toni Morrison died recently. She was 88 years old. The Swedish Academy said her "novels were characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

That "essential aspect of American reality" makes MAGA caps ridiculous.

We'll miss her.

Must cats be cats?

If he was in a pick-up game on some ball diamond, he'd be out in right, if he was on the field at all. He's not an athlete--trust me on that. He's not agile, not thin. Our grandkids claim he's huge. Look at him. He's got a serious case of middle-age spread, and he's not even middle-age. He's a millennial. 

And he's got rituals, like all of us. He loves to haunt the garage at night, stands at the door as if he's dying to be out there when we go to bed. When I let him back in in the morning, he tromps downstairs--he's not quiet--then insists on sitting on my lap even though I have no such thing when I'm here up against the desk and at my keyboard. He won't stop bawling until I take him up here anyway (and he's huge, remember), pet him a while, not long, before he leaves and maybe sits in the window to watch the birds feeding just outside.

Great life he's got, really. Later, when his mistress is up too, he begs to go outside on the deck, so we let him, and all's well.

For a while. 

Lately, our heavy-set, big shouldered, thick-bellied Blue Russian has determined he wants to be a beast, to follow the pad-steps of some long-ago barbarian ancestor and grab birds right out of the air. He's weighs more than a shot put, but he's pulled it off four times now. We're sitting in the living room drinking morning coffee when suddenly there's a huge thumping just outside and some frantic bird is screaming. There our heavyweight stands at the screen door with a frenzied sputzie, feathers a' fluttering, in his teeth. 

If he just simply must hunt, I'd as soon not know about it. His victims go mad, which he  loves--he seems far less interested in murder than torture, and it's not that he's hungry.

But he wants in. Bird-in-chops, he demands to come in. Why? Does he have to champion his own worst instincts? Does he need his approval for his crimes?

All the while the poor victim--a goldfinch last month, a baby robin just a day or two ago--is screaming to escape the his teeth. 

I open the door a crack, and he butts in. I put my foot in front of his bird-laden face, and he squirms to the side, absolutely determined. All we need is a bird in the living room. I counter his moves, push him back, and he dodges, like some fine boxer, like Ali. He wants to bring that poor fluttering victim into the house. I'm not happy he picked that bird off in the first place; the last thing I'm interested in is his being a savage with a baby bird right here on our living room rug.

What is it with cats? They've got to show off? I've always considered their charm is their sheer unflappable character. They're almost totally expressionless. Does he want to bring him in to prove he's macho? That's horribly un-cat, isn't it? 

Finally, I get outside and sort of kick him around the deck until his jaw loosens and the poor bird escapes, forever traumatized but alive. I'll give him that. As yet, at least, he hasn't killed one. 

My wife says I need to chill because Smoky is just doing what cats do. Well, yes, but that they move their bowels doesn't mean we tolerate their doing it in the bathroom sink. 

Once our sweet neighbor lady, a sworn cat-lover, tired of her Donald killing off birds in the bushes on the side of the house. Donald was a street fighter if there ever was one, and he warn't about to throw down his weapons and quit the game. Thusly, she hung a sweet little bell around his bull neck, released him back into the outdoors, and determined she had the problem cured until Donald learned--get this!--to walk in a step that kept that bell from tolling. Seriously. That happened. 

Soon enough, he was doing what my wife says cats do, cats like ours too--heavy-set non-athletes.

Must we be victims of our nature's worst behaviors?--that's the question I need answered. Are we powerless to change what we are? Are cats? Must cats be cats?

The sun's up. Time to let him in.

The New Normal

Guy I know sent me this meme (below)--me and a dozen other people on his list of cronies. He sends me a lot of things like this. He believes I'm like him. In some ways, I am--retired white guy. 

After the title line, the meme he sent is all in red.

I used to be a normal man.

As a man, I used to think I was a regular person, but I was born white, which now, whether I like it or not, makes me a racist & responsible for slavery.

[Okay, I get this.] 

I am a fiscal & moral conservative, which by today's standards, makes me a fascist because I plan & support myself.

[Not like other lazy a--hole welfare queens.]

I went to High School, worked through college, got a degree & have held a job. I am not here because I earned it, but because I was advantaged.

[He didn't go to college and never finished high school, but he didn't write this meme--he's just yukking about it and passing it along, figuring I'll get a kick out of it too.]

I am heterosexual, which according to gay folks, now makes me a homophobe.

I am non-union, which makes me a traitor to the working class & ally of big business.

I am not a Muslim, which now labels me as an infidel.

I believe in the 2nd Amendment, which makes me a member of the vast NRA gun lobby.

I am older than 65 & retired, making me a useless old man who doesn't understand Facebook.

[Yeah, good stuff]

I think & I reason, so I doubt what main stream media tells me, which must make me a reactionary.

[Sure--main stream media. Sure. Preach it.]

I am proud of my heritage & our inclusive American culture, making me a xenophobe.

[I'm not sure exactly what he means by "inclusive American culture?"--but I think I know.]

I value my safety & that of my family, & I appreciate the police & the legal system, making me a right-wing, cop-loving extremist.

I believe in hard work, fair play, & fair compensation according to each individual's merits, which today makes me an anti-socialist.

I believe our system guarantees freedom of effort - not freedom of outcome or subsidies, which must make me a borderline sociopath.

I believe in the defense & protection of America for & by all citizens, now making me a militant.

[These last few are sketchy, but he's got something going, doesn't he?]

I am proud of our flag, what it stands for, & the many who died to let it fly, so I stand & salute during our National Anthem, taking me back where I started - I must be a racist.

[NFL stuff. Yeah, hit that too.]

Please help me come to terms with the new me because I'm just not sure who I am anymore!

[He's begging someone to hear him. Me, I guess--after all, I got the meme.  And Trump, don't you think? Trump speaks this language too. He knows. "Make America Great Again."]

I thank my friends for sticking with me through these abrupt, newfound changes to my thinking! I just can't imagine or understand what's happened to me so quickly! Funny - it all took place over the last 7 or 8 years! 

[What's-his-name?--that guy from Kenya? He done us all in.]

If all this nonsense wasn't enough to deal with, now I don't even know which restroom to use, & I gotta go..........FREQUENTLY!!!

[Ahhhh, great joke!!! Side-splittin' stuff. "I used to be a normal man." Well, welcome to the new normal, eh? "Where's the john?"--what a hoot! But if you're thinking of passing this particular meme along, don't--not right now anyway. Wait for the mess to go away like it always does after these shooting things. You know, talk about mental health--and video games.] 

Morning Thanks--old stories

"Over the next several days, . . .heaps of ungainly and impractical objects strewn throughout the plain became a frequent site."

Even though Hernan Diaz's In the Distance tells a story that seems, at time, inside-out, Diaz uses long-established places and themes throughout a novel that became a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2017. He sends his protagonist, Hakan, or "Hawk" as Americans name him, across the country, circa 1850, on the Oregon Trail, for one thing. But, strangely, Hawk travels it backward, west to east. 

The effects of such little literary magic is fascinating; we see altogether familiar sights in the canon of literature of the West in a new guise. That Hawk finds "stuff" strewn along the trail, when the load had to be lightened, bulk had to be disposed of, isn't new.  The Oregon Trail was, in some places, an immense junkyard.  As the way west got more and more difficult, Hawk's finding discarded valuables isn't surprising. A little museum along I-80 in west-central Nebraska illustrates that phenomenon touchingly.

But Hawk isn't aboard some generic wagon train. A giant of a man, he is traveling alone, against the grain, west to east, bound not for gold fields or abundance in Oregon, but for New York, where his one goal in life is to find an older brother from whom he was separated when they left Sweden and emigrated. 

In the Distance is an all-American story that deconstructs the mythic proportions of America's western movement and the tainted glory of "Manifest Destiny" without bashing what is, in many ways, the quintessential American western saga. Maybe the best way to say it is he reminds you to see what you may have forgotten. 

Hawk's sheer physicality is worthy of a Western, but he knows little English and has no rich language skills. His old country childhood was immensely isolated and sheltered. He's a blonde giant unloosed on a frontier world he doesn't begin to understand, an innocent in a landscape peopled with kooks and criminals.

He's a child really, and that's part of his appeal. When he finds graves along the Trail, he's startled, then saddened.

One morning, he woke up to find that he had slept a stone's throw from a makeshift graveyard. The tombstones, three planks stuck upright in the ground, bore words that had been burned into them with a hot iron. Although unable to read them, Hakan could see the despair in those unsteady lines.

Even if you've seen such things before or read about them, a man/boy like Hakan stumbling on a makeshift cemetery along a highway of dust a mile wide moves you, regardless of how many books or movies have told the same story. Hawk wasn't there for the burials, but somehow he feels the same darkness.

Two of the plots must have been for very young children. The earth on all three had been torn up and raked by hungry paws. Hakan found the contrast between the improvised, impermanent nature of the graves and the final, definite condition of those in them immensely sad. 

In Omaha, high on a bluff above the river, the Mormon Trail Center remembers just that kind of devastating moment with a looming statue in the cemetery set there way back in 1936, a young couple cowering beneath the weight of their loss, somewhere along the windswept prairie. He's holding her up, but look at his legs and feet--he is barely able to stand himself.

There, in the ground, faintly visible, lies the body of their child, a child the Mormons would name "a saint."

I'm thankful, this morning, for the humbling stories that take us deeply into the difficult lives of others. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Now I Lay Me

In peace I will lie down and sleep,

    for you alone, Lord,

    make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4:8

At the heart of every story is conflict—a cat and a dog, a girl and a boy, an old man and his grief, a young woman and her insecurity. You can’t have a story without something, or someone, creating problems. There’s got to be an ouch.

For a book that I wrote long, long ago, a book of stories about people’s lives, I decided rather late in the game to interview an older couple I had once known, people I knew to be good and decent and kind, people I assumed, really, didn’t have huge conflicts. Honestly, I wanted to test the notion I’d come to believe, thirty-some interviews into this book, that everybody experiences sharp conflicts, everyone has a story.

It was a perfectly sunny day, I remember, and we sat on their front porch, my tape recorder spinning, catching a conversation that featured dozens of questions that unearthed nothing particularly memorable. The retired folks were everything I thought they would be—responsible, devout, easy-going, well-mannered. They weren’t necessarily saintly, but after two hours of names and places and darling family vacations, I felt myself in grave danger of having no story.

And then suddenly—and how exactly it happened I don’t remember—the old man looked at his wife cautiously, the kind of anxious glance I recognized immediately. “Are we going to tell him?” he asked her.

I had no idea what he was referring to, but with a certain strain of the eyes and those few words, I knew I was close to something memorable. We’d finally come to that particular something which kept them awake nights. Things happen in all of our lives that lead to sleepless nights.

David may have been the man closest to God’s own heart, but he had, nonetheless, myriad causes for sleeplessness. The prophet Nathan told him that evil will arise from his own household as a result of the Bathsheba affair and Uriah’s murder. Just picture rebel son Absalom hanging from his hair in a tree. Is it any wonder the King did some serious tossing and turning?

Psalm 4 is, among other things, a holy bromide for lousy sleepers, which includes most of us, really. Ironically, David’s horrifying anguish, his suffering, is our joy; because what’s here in the psalm is, if nothing else, a witness to something too many of us likely fight in silence—anxiety, lots of it. One in five of us suffers from some form of anxiety, so much so that it affects our behavior, according to a 2017 study reported in JAMA.

Psalm 4 starts with the command form, as so many psalms do: “Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress.” When you start a sentence with a verb, what follows is not supplication. David is not so much begging as demanding.

But by the end of the psalm, he’s loosened his fists: “In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep” is the opening line of the first prayer many of us learn as a child, in an innocence no one will ever regain. The last line of Psalm 4 is almost a match, just as much a pledge life teaches to those of us who know at least something of deliverance.

Nasty stuff

That poor old Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the Senate and loyal liege of King Donald of Orange, just hates being called "Moscow Mitch" is just a hoot. He's not just upset or irritated, he's boiling mad. He's outraged. He doesn't think he deserves it.

This, despite the fact that his fearless leader does it almost hourly. The man whose robe he totes hands out slams like no pol and certainly no President in the history of these United States. Trump, king of branding and would-be king of the empire, says right now he believes it'll be "Sleepy Joe" running against him next year, like Lyin' Hillary (plus Cruel Hillary and Heartless Hillary) did before him. Long before that, came Lyin' Ted, Little Marco, Low-Energy Jeb. When Mayor Pete was a'rising, he was Alfred E. Neuman. Nobody caught the trashing like Leakin' Lyin' James Comey, who also went by Sanctimonius, Slippery, Slimy, and Shady Jim Comey, who, let's remember, aided and abetted the Trump candidacy by announcing the reopening of the Hillary email investigation little more than a week before the election Trump lost (by three million votes) but won (in the Electoral College).

Just for the record, there's also Lightweight Gillibrand, Al Frankenstein, Cheatin' Obama, High Tax-High Crime Nancy, Wacky Nancy, Crazy Nancy, and Nervous Nancy. Just about every woman who crosses him gets the name "Nasty." Countless more too. Look 'em up if you've got a couple of hours sometime.

So Joe Scarborough, once a Republican member of the House and now his own style of talk show host. just happens to toss out a nickname for poor Mitch McConnell--"Moscow Mitch," Scarborough says, because McConnell had the audacity to personally scrub two bills off the senate agenda, not even allowing them a vote--both of them came with by-partisan approval, both dealing with cyber-meddling associated with the firmly established record of Russian interference in the 2016.

But the POTUS won't let the matter be discussed anywhere in his hearing. Russian interference if "fake news," anyone who mention it is an "enemy of the people." It's all a Trumpian litany.

"Moscow Mitch, "Moscow Mitch," "Moscow Mitch." I say, let the banner be raised. Our side has finally done it to theirs.

Lest any of us forget, there's an old story, lost in the blizzard of breaking news, that should itself be shouted from the hilltops. Here it is from McConnell's district, the Louisville Courier-Journal just this morning:

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, President Barack Obama called top congressional Republicans and Democrats together and informed them of national intelligence assessments that found the Russians were using an internet disinformation campaign to influence the presidential election.

Obama wanted to send out a bipartisan statement warning the Russians that such meddling wouldn’t be tolerated, but it also would have served notice to Americans that what they were reading online may have been placed there by Russian actors.

McConnell objected. Not only did he refuse to sign the letter, the Washington Post reported later that McConnell said “he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.”

For most of Trump's two years in office, McConnell has criticized Obama for not playing hardball with the Russians right then, when in fact he was the one who quashed the report that would have made Russian interference public before the 2016 election. Why?--the report was "too partisan."

What drew Joe Scarborough's ire was McConnell's saying "too partisan" again last week in denying the possibility of a vote on substantial legislation that at least attempted to address what everyone except Trump knows was Russian interference. "Too partisan," McConnell said, and Joe Scarborough called him "Moscow Mitch, which fit like a round and furry winter hat.

And that's the way he comes up on t-shirts right now, which just burns his Kentucky butt.

Turnabout is fair play. "Moscow Mitch"--I hope it sticks.

"Grandma Los," from CRC Family Portrait (ii)

I had two objectives in all those interviews and all those stories: first, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the subject--life, profession, character; second, I wanted to know what they thought of the denomination of which they were a part. The CRC was greatly more "ethnic" back then, much more of a family. As I remember, that question--"So what do you think about the church?"--made sense to everyone I asked, including this 80-year-old matriarch, as you will discover.

____________________________________ 

During the Thirties, Pete and Hattie spend altogether too much good farming time cleaning up dust from the kitchen, shaking it out of the quilts, spanking it out of the children’s clothes, night after night—every night a pail full from inside the home. "We saw it coming when we left church one Sunday. It looked maybe like rain," she says. "I had left my children's clothes on the bed, you know, for them to change after church. When I came upstairs, I could barely see them on the bed, already there was so much dust." It was new to them and therefore scary, because they didn't know what was happening.

Soon they knew. Dust took over the farm like a snarling landlord, choking machinery, blinding the livestock. South Dakota became a dust bowl.

They watched as grasshoppers devoured crops made frail by drought and raging prairie winds. “It was over 100 degrees in March,” she says. “And the land had been so good before. We didn’t know what was happening. The hoppers ate everything later, even the onions in the ground."

They were rescued by Roosevelt's New Deal, Pete given jobs that brought them enough money for clothes and food for their growing family.

The Los family lived with the Sioux on the Rosebud Reservation. They made friends with dark-skinned people with non-Frisian names like No Good. They traded bread and butter, eggs and meat, for the Indians' government surplus handouts, clothing that seemed ridiculous to the Indians: wool army coats, buckle boots, hats. They watched other whites, even whites from their own church, take advantage of the Sioux: steal the horses the Indians let run and cheat them out of what they deserved for the fence posts they would cut from the river and bring up to the farmers for trade.

While Pete's Dutch nephews risked their lives hiding from conscription into Hitler's Nazi army, the Los family here in America gave up a son-and-brother to the Allied war effort. Frank, twenty-five, the second of the boys, already the father of two children, was killed in December of 1944, the month of his birthday, very soon after digging his first foxhole in European earth. The life of Hattie Los is a course in American history.

Hattie Los has lived through what she has because she's strong. She's a powerful woman, even today in a wheelchair. Her shoulders are broad and square, her arms still thick as heavy branches. Her hair is white, and little wisps of silver curl out from beneath the hair net over the back of her head. Her eyes are clear and fresh behind the rectangular glasses she wears when she reads from the pile of books lying next to her big soft chair. And her features, her nose and mouth, seem almost muscular-the kind of face, the kind of woman, really, who could live on the plains in the very bad years, the kind of woman who could love on the plains in the very bad years.

"I can cry easy," she says, "both from being sad and being happy." Not long ago, in one Sunday morning service, Grandma Los saw three grandchildren bap­tized and two make public profession of faith. "I was filled up with joy," she says. "I could have cried." The threat of tears is in her eyes when she remembers that Sunday, but the threat's there, too, the moment she mentions those of her family who don't care for the church. "I can cry easy," she says again, but when she tells her stories, one realizes that easy is not the right word. Grandma Los was a farm wife, a South Dakota prairie woman, a strong Frisian, a mother who delivered seven of her own nine children with the help of her husband alone. Grandma Los feels deeply, but doesn't cry easily.

"But it hurts," she says, when she talks of those other grandchildren, brought up in the church, graduated from the local Christian school, former students at denominational colleges, those grandchildren today rejecting the church, even neglecting their Lord. She says it hurts her that her grandchildren can go to Calvin or Dordt and then not care. She prays for the colleges. She says that the church is only as strong as our colleges. "It starts in the colleges," she says, her hands out in front of her, constantly moving. 'They got to teach the right principles, the right religion," she says, even her rheumatic shoulders pumping when she speaks.

"Maybe I'm here yet to pray for my grandchildren," .be explains, her smile brightening again. "That's my privilege.''

Perhaps every Christian Reformed church doesn't have a Grandma Los. If so, then some are not so blessed as Delavan.

Not so much different from Grandma Los really. She faces no such winter. She faces only eternal spring, better than the warmest May afternoon in Delavan. She knows it. And that's what lights her smile, a smile of more than eighty years of life. 

_________________________ 

Writers are carpetbaggers. We ride in and out, make ourselves comfortable in other people's lives, scribble down what we find interesting, then leave to some basement carrel to do our work. 

Consider this a confession, something good for the soul. For several years after the afternoon I spent with her, I received a Christmas card from Grandma Los. Each time, she'd wish me and my family a blessed Christmas, and then she'd say, "Now you should stop by for coffee again sometime." 

She lived a couple hours away from where we lived back then, and I was busy--busy, busy, busy. It's easy for me to say now, but I really should have visited, stopped by for coffee and a goodie.

Grandma Los died in 1989.

"Grandma Los" from CRC Family Portrait (i)

Here's the first half of a story I wrote about Hattie Los forty years ago. It's one of 35 feature stories I wrote for The Banner, a weekly magazine of the Christian Reformed Church. Generally, I asked friends and acquaintances for possible subjects, then interviewed ordinary people they'd recommend, men and women, old and young from all over the continent, members of the CRC. "Her story is a chronicle of American history," I wrote. It was and is. I've never forgotten the stories she told me, always treasured them.

_______________________ 

The living room of Hattie Los's home is little more than a cubicle; the ceiling is low and the dark brown paneling shows that someone has tried to make one­hundred-year-old plaster walls look suburban. It's the kind of place where you might guess a great­grandmother would live--there's not a right angle in the house.

Grandma Los lives alone, but the room is crowded with chairs--straight chairs, a captain's chair, maybe a rocker, a sofa, and at least one big soft one in the corner opposite the TV stand. All the chairs are for Sunday, of course, for that one hour after church when her children, and their children, and their children's children drop by for a '' goodie.'

'
Paint-by-number landscapes line the walls. "Pete did those," she says. Pete was Mr. Los. He died just a few months before their sixty-third wedding anniversary. There's a card from President Ford on the china cabinet, framed, a picture of the President pasted on. "That was for our sixtieth," she says. "Cut the picture out of The Banner." Hattie Los smiles continuously, but when she talks about her Pete, her smile brightens even more. "He's dead now, two years. He's where he always hoped he'd be someday," she says.

Just outside of Grandma Los’s kitchen window stands a massive oak, strong and dignified, its gnarled branches and twigs grown in a thousand crooked angles; yet, somehow, all together, they create a nearly perfect circle above the thick, proud trunk. It's an old tree, full of stories probably--if trees could talk--stories of how the men once laid the brick that makes your tires grumble when you drive down the main street of Delavan, Wisconsin. It's a scrub oak, a second-class oak, the kind of oak that's not as clean, perhaps not as pure, as its cousin oak trees. But it's straight and strong.

Oak was once the wood of the people. Few midwestem families had kitchen tables that weren't cut from open-grained oak. Hard wood. Wood that could put up with years of coffee, dinners, coffee, suppers, generations of milk-spillers, entire lifetimes. Grandma Los's scrub oak is that kind of oak. In early October it ignites as if set afire by a natural torch, turn­ing yellow and orange and brown in a spectacular ritual that only Grandma Los could recount exactly. As beautiful as it is in the late spring, its green leaves un­furled in the warm southern breezes, autumn is the scrub oak's showcase.

Grandma Los--almost everyone calls her "Grandma" --is, in her own way, not so much different from that big oak outside her window. She's over eighty now, brimming with stories. She doesn't get out to church anymore; but she listens to tapes of four sermons every week, two from the local preacher, two from her son in Michigan. Her rheumatoid arthritis has swelled her joints, all of them, with stiffness, and her lumpy hands portray her lifelong battle, her fingers thick and angular like the branches of the scrub oak. "But I do just fine," she says, her left hand patting the arm of her wheelchair. "Aspirin keeps the pain down," she says, smiling, as always, "and I don't feel it at all like in the old days." She raises her hands in front of her face, touching her fingers pointer to pointer in a kind of gesture. "When I was fifteen, I spent three months bed while it just spread from one place to another. “Couldn’t even get up.”

Later, she and her husband had nine children. "But you know," she says, "that whole time I was never bothered by it, not until I was close to fifty. Nine children. Pete on the farm. All the kids. “And I was just as active as anybody. That's a miracle."

Hattie Los had to be active. Her story is a chronicle of American history: a South Dakota childhood, her parents an immigrant Frisian couple, the Logtermans of Springfield; married before she was twenty to Peter Los, son of a good, middle-class merchant from Leiden, the only member of a strong family to feel any urge for the adventure of a new country. "I’ll be back in five years," Pete had told his family when he left in 1911. 

Then came the war. Then he met Hattie. He finally did return, but not until after World War II, when both mother and father had recently died. There was no medicine during the Nazi occupation.

______________________________ 

Tomorrow, the second half of the story of Hattie Los.

More Los memories

What's left of an old country church, Purewater, SD

Peter Los was a city boy in the Netherlands. He'd never lived on a farm, didn't know how to milk a cow or harness a horse. 

I asked him [a former neighbor] if I could go along to America when he was going back. It all sounded so good to me to work in the big fields with horses and machinery and to milk cows and feed hogs and gather eggs by the pail full. He said I would be welcome to go along.

That was Pete Los's vision. His life began in Holland, but his story begins with emigration. "There was not much future for me in Holland, as Father and Uncle Koos were quite young yet and jobs were very scarce at that time. . . .I promised my sisters I would come back in five years. A promise I did not keep." 

There was little horror on the voyage over. It was 1911, not 1845. On deck, he says, people played shuffleboard. He says he ate too much, in fact--or at least ate more than his body required since did no heavy lifting all the way over.

After leaving the coast of England we did not see any more land until we arrived at New York. It was a wonderful sight! We arrived in the evening and all those lights from those high buildings made a wonderful sight. We did not leave the boat until the morning. Next was going through the customs. I had nothing of value so it did not take long.

What's clear from his memoir, as well as Hattie's, is that when the two of them died they had riches untold, even if their bank account hadn't grown all that much. Occasionally through their many years of marriage, they owned their own home; but for most of their married lives, they rented, first this place, then that. They married in Springfield, SD, lived for a while in Purewater, SD, then all the way out west in Ripon, CA, where they determined they missed the plains and moved back to Springfield. When the ground dried to dust and grasshoppers ate the onions right out of the ground, they moved east to Delavan, Wisconsin, then tried Pease, Minnesota, for a year and a winter when they were so totally snowed-in that they went back to southern Wisconsin. 

I think I hit them all. Oh no, late in life--Alto, Wisconsin, too.

But treasures?--nine kids, seven delivered with little help from anyone, just the two of them--Pete and Hattie. Hattie always wanted to be a nurse and got good at birthing, helped mothers down the road deliver babies. "She had functioned about a dozen times as a midwife for neighbors and friends," Pete remembers. "In our own family, she even did her own midwiving for the last seven of our nine kids," and then he adds, "only with a little help from her husband." If it could have been a one-person maneuver,  it's hard to imagine that Hattie would not have managed the whole business herself. 

She picked up midwifery at Purewater, when, with the help of the Rosebud reservation doctor, she helped out a neighbor. They were living in a chicken coop right then. "This really wasn't too bad," she writes, "because it was a two room chicken coop."

One of theirs, Etheleen, arrived at Purewater on the Sabbath, in a blizzard. They hadn't gone to church. How she tells the story is perfectly disarming. 

We spent the day reading Bible stories, singing hymns, and visiting together. After supper we put the children to bed at eight because they had to go to school the next day. By nine we had a new member in our family! Etheleen had arrived. She was a beautiful big baby. I am sure she weighed at least ten pounds, but we didn't have a scale to prove it. 

Then she explains what happened often when she remembers her babies: "Soon she was dressed and snuggled in my arms, so Dad and I went to bed and got a good night's rest."

Amazing.

Late in life, Dutch relatives sent them two tickets to fly to Amsterdam. Pete says flying was "a wonderful experience, one that we will never forget."

There was about a hundred passengers. It was not long and we were away from mother earth and above the clouds. It looked somewhat like we were traveling a hundred feet above snow covered prairies of South Dakota. . . .One thing they do on these jets is feed you plenty. We had a big supper right away, and going east it was soon dark. . . .When it was midnight in Darien, it was breakfast time already on board the jet, and a few hours later we were in Schiphol. . .

Pete died in 1978, Hattie in 1989. I spent an afternoon in her kitchen in 1981, almost forty years ago. Their Xeroxed memoirs, bound in plastic, move blessedly through lives that began in the last years of the 19th century and create, together, a delightful museum. 

Maybe it's a blessing to know that we won't be around to see how people read through our lives a century hence, what wonder and surprise they'll feel--how they'll smile at the memories of their quaint ancestors.

I hope they do. I hope they can. In life, I hope I smile as much and often as did Pete and Hattie Los. It was, after all, a two-room chicken coop. 

Morning Thanks--Grandma's stories

"Life is not as predictable as a river," she says, and she grew up along the Missouri, long before that muddy outlaw was dammed up and thereby forcibly restrained. "A river may change its course from time to time," she writes, "but it always ends in the ocean." About that she's right, when it comes to rivers at least; but right about her family's life too. 

Her grandma had stayed behind in Holland, in Friesland, when her husband, Paytrus Tjeerdsma, left for America. Her grandma had reasons--her seven children were married and had children of their own in Friesland. Leaving was quite unthinkable. But when her widowed daughter, with whom grandma lived, remarried, the river took a sudden turn. Grandpa had been begging her to leave the old country and join him in South Dakota. 

But "before definite plans were made, a persistent sore throat had to be checked by the doctor--cancer. Instead of greeting his wife in the adopted land, Grandpa received the traditional black bordered envelope that gave him the sad news that Grandma had died." 

The deliberate way of telling the story may seem callous, but you've got to remember that no one ever taught Hattie Logterman Los how to write stories, and she didn't have much practice. In rural South Dakota in 1910, there was way too much hardscrabble life to live. She was close to 80 when she lifted the pen to put all of that life down onto paper. No one ever taught her how to create a scene or build drama. What you get on the pages of her memoir is instead raw material, the real thing. 

Grandpa Logterman's daughter Dora "worked out" with a neighbor family, which was fine with Dora. But Dora wanted more. She liked the neighbors and their family, but she wanted to be more American, Hattie says in her family memoir, so she "took a job caring for the family of an 'American,'" someone without wooden shoes. This particular "American" owned the grocery store, where "she learned to do things 'the American way,'" Hattie says.

Dora's exercise in multi-culturalism did not banish her from the tight circle of Hollanders from which she'd come. Hattie describes what happened next to that Dutch-American couple in that American store: "There were two young men who seemed to have a greater hunger for candy and cigars. One was. . .Jacob Logterman." And then this: "Jacob had need of a girl like this." 

You know how it is.  A guy has a need. A man gets to a certain age, a certain time in life, and he comes to know that he got to get someone to help with chores. You need to get a wife like you need to get a haircut. 

But there's more:

But, was she interested in him? She seemed happy when she sold cigars to him, but was she just a good clerk? Finally, he could stand it no longer. He asked her if she would go to a barn dance with him. To his surprise, she said, 'yes.'"

Then, this: "To the surprise of both of them, she had never danced a step in her life!" That may be overstatement. After all, Dora Tjeerdsma was Dutch Reformed.

Unmistakably, Hattie Logterman Los, who never really tried her hand at writing, turns up the art a little anyway: "Jacob proved to be a concerned teacher, and few students could match Dora's interest in subject matter and her 'school master'."

That's as close as we'll get to heavy breathing. But that's okay.

All that deliberate high-stepping clearly had consequences: "This proved to be such a successful thing that Jacob decided he should be able to win this young lady." What follows is right down the river bed. "Three months after that first date Jacob decided it was time to 'pop the question.'"

Forty years ago, I sat in Hattie Los's kitchen 500 miles east in Delavan, Wisconsin, and listened to her tell the story. The picture I took back then has her posed as if reading the very same memoir I spent hours with yesterday. Forty years ago I was writing a series of portraits of members of the denomination I'm still a part of, and Grandma Los was suggested as a subject by her preacher. She was, he told me, "Grandma Los" to everyone in church. 

The church matriarch, I thought--sure. Back then, every church had one. Maybe, if blessed, more than just one. 

That's what put me in her kitchen forty years ago. That's why yesterday, I spent my Sabbath afternoon reading her story again, first time after all those years, and loving it just the same.

The river of her life flowed into the gracious arms of her savior. Hattie Logterman Los died nine years later, in 1989. But this morning's thanks are for a story that never really left me, a story of faith and life.