So horrifically understandable

What seemed so clear to me is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so forth and so forth and so forth, an almost inexorable chain of events. 

Begin here. I have no desire to be unkind to Oklahomans, but what needs to be said is that its white founding fathers were not of New England Puritan stock. Many of its pioneers were the stuff of Western legend, and Oklahoma itself, once called Indian Territory, was home to more than its share of tough hombres.

After the war, scores of ex-slaves left the cotton-picking south following the dreams of the West, just thousands of others up north. In Oklahoma, those emigres were Southerners especially, many of whom had never touted Abraham Lincoln, considered his "emancipation" talk astutely unnatural because it was clear to them that Lincoln had never had to live with. . .well you know, the n-word. 

By 1890, the Five Civilized Tribes who'd suffered through the Trail of Tears assessed their plight in Indian Territory and signed on to the provisions of the Dawes Act (1887), which offered land ownership to Native people if they would give up their tribal governance and associations. The effect, in Oklahoma as elsewhere, was to free up land for thousands more white pioneers, many of whom were embittered Southerners not so much leaving Dixie behind as lugging their losses and grievances with them.

Thus, while freed slaves moving into the region expected self-governance--freedom itself, in Indian Territory--the movers and shakers in city hall were, often as not, ex-Rebs who were not particularly interested the freedom of ex-slaves or "equality" (whatever that meant!) for, well, the n-word once again.

What's perfectly understandable is that, thus, a town like Tulsa, before the oil strikes, was the very model of segregation in the late 19th century, maybe not as blatant as it was in the Jim Crow South, but a world as segregated as any devised by apartheid South Africans. There was Tulsa--the white world--and there was Greenwood--the black. It was very simple and very clearly drawn.

Segregation or not, those ex-slaves not only survived, they flourished. Right there on the streets of Greenwood, their city, they did well, did better than well, in fact, so much so that some people called the place Black Wall Street.  

Then something happened. Exactly what, no one knows.

For a moment in time, old South-level hate threatened the barriers already set between the races in Tulsa--to white folks, what a black boy did to a white girl was an abomination that often led to lynchings throughout the South. Furthermore, the lynching of a white man had occurred recently, an event at which the Sheriff and the police chief had condemned the mob violence but made it clear that the hanging had been a benefit to life in the city.

It all seems so perfectly understandable. Thus, when crowds of white men, 2000 strong, were milling around the courthouse where the "Diamond Dick" Rowland, the kid who touched the white girl was held, dozens of African-Americans in Greenwood, some of them vets who'd only recently returned from the Great War, determined that what seemed inevitable was, this time, not going to happen. They went, single-file, to the courthouse and offered their protection to the Sheriff, who just waved them off. 

Tulsa had become a tinderbox. Then, on May 31, at 10:30 at night, a white man attempted to disarm an African-American World War I vet. A shot rang out. Thus it began. 

It was all so clearly a matter of this cause and that effect, that cause and this effect--it was so perfectly understandable. 

And so horribly evil. 

Hope on the trail of tears

The Trail of Tears

President Andrew Jackson's bright idea to put every tribe and Native nation under the sun into what he called "Indian Territory," then keep them there, created what we know as "The Trail of Tears," a bloody path that took thousands from the deep South all the way into what is today Oklahoma.

The "Five Civilized Tribes" who made the journey weren't dressed in breech cloths or buffalo robes. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the Southern states for some time, were more assimilated into American culture than might be imagined. But they became, as all Native people were to Euro-Americans, "in the way," so Jackson and his minions in Congress moved them out. Of the 15,000 Creeks who journeyed the trail, 3500 were left behind, buried along the way.

The Cherokee and Chickasaw, like the Creek and Choctaw, had come from Dixie, where those indigenous people who owned land they farmed were often wealthy enough to own slaves, Black men and women they brought with them with to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and slave-holders were soon all immensely impoverished. Just getting along was not easy in Indian Territory. The Omaha people lived in fear of having to go there; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.

All of this is a tale that can't be told enough. A Rev. Alexander Reid, a Scotsman, graduate of Princeton, took a missions position after his seminary graduation and was sent to the Spencer School in Indian Territory, a school for Choctaw boys. In the years before the Civil War, Reid got to know a slave couple who had belonged to a Choctaw, but were given to Rev. Reid for employment at the Spencer School.

Wallace and Minerva Willis, whose entire lives had been lived in slavery, were a delight not only to Rev. Reid but also the school boys who learned to love to hear them sing what they called their "plantation songs," spirituals created and sung in a fashion that even the Choctaw boys came to hear as African-American. The story goes that the two of them, the Willises, after supper, would sit out on their porch and sing together, go through a repertoire Rev. Reid grew to admire so greatly he took down the lyrics and melodies himself because he didn't want those blessed spirituals forgotten once the couple he called Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped singing altogether.

When the Reverend Reid's wife died, he left Spencer School and went back to New Jersey for his children's education, where one night he attended a concert put on by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a concert composed of "plantation songs." At the concert, the Fisk people announced their immediate schedule, told the audience where they'd be singing in the area, and then noted that the melodies they'd sung that night were all they knew and that if anyone in the audience determined to attend another concert, they shouldn't be saddened to have to hear the same songs over again. 

The Rev. Reid lingered after the concert and told the singers he knew songs that were as beautiful as anything they'd sung that night. From memory, he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including something called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and "Steal Away," and more.

For decades already, ethnographers have suggested--even insisted--that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than they were, in fact, lightly disguised ads for the Underground Railroad, or simple expressions of heartfelt hopes and dreams, finally, for freedom right here on the earth beneath their shackled feet. 

I'd like to think they're right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may well be as much a wish for heaven's glory as it is for ordinary human freedom. But whatever import may be in those call-and-response lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"--what is historical fact that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's melodies in their concerts, including the concert they gave in England for Queen Victoria. From an Indian Territory's evening hymn sung on the porch of the home of two beloved Choctaw slaves, all the way to Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low" has become one of the most recognized melodies of world musical literature.

I don't know that we can tell that story often enough, a story we all need to hear sometime or another, a hymn all about the triumph of hope on the Trail of Tears.

Lux Fest, 2021

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for an elementary-school gym's worth of red-blooded Luxembourgian genealogists to show off the research otherwise done on kitchen tables and in front of computer screens, to jabber on endlessly about Great-Aunt Bertha who, with her step-mother, happened by an shop in the old country and actually smiled at the Grand Duke, who just happened by himself. "Read it in an old letter I found in a Bible"--that kind of thing. "Got it translated by old Uncle Rudolf." 

You know.

The gym was full of yarn-swapping, family chroniclers, a beautiful thing to behold really, lots of 'em. It was their day, all about them and what they knew about the ancient past, the 150th anniversary commemoration of the arrival of a caravan of ox-drawn wagons to a place so void of trees that in order to avoid wind and snow and hail, they had to be built their homes from sod. 

It was one grand opportunity for old folks to have some say in things by reminiscing with swarms of others just as anxious to honor both the hard times and all the prairie sweetness. Lux Fest was all about history--Luxembourgian-American history; and most of the crowd in that gym were trigger-happy, kitchen table genealogists, armed with endless stories they'd stored up during endless years of trying to decipher old letters. 

It's not a huge story, really, because Luxembourg, the country, is not much bigger than Plymouth County, Iowa, where most of their pioneer families put down roots. Even today, Luxembourg has considerably less than a million people--an inch or two more than 600,000. As many as ten percent of the country emigrated to America in the 19th century, a high percentage but just a fraction of those many thousands who departed neighboring Germany or even the Netherlands.

They showed up on the vast prairies of the far corner of the state of Iowa in the very same year, 1870, as the Dutch, two bastions of contrasting and contrary ethnics, steeply Roman Catholic Luxembourgians and stiff-necked Dutch Reformers, all of them pretty much incapable of speaking English, the language of their adopted home. 

They'd be proud to go on and on about their conviction to build a church for the community. In fact the "St. Donatus Site" marks the original settlement and the spot where the first church was built, the "Prairie Church."

Today, there's only a memorial out there.

And a bible verse.

And a brand new sign.

For 150 years we've been neighbors, sometimes sworn enemies, sometimes just rivals, sometimes friends. These days, some of us are part of them, and some of them are part of us, and we're all part of we, I'd guess. Our ancestors didn't come out here to the far corner of the state together, but they arrived at the same time, 1870. As Euro-American communities, we're the same age. Saturday, our neighbors, the Luxembourgians, celebrated the birthday of their community here in the rich black soil of Siouxland. 

Lux Fest didn't have the pop of Tulip Festival--no street scrubbing, no cotton candy or Tilt-a-whirls, no Pride of the Dutchmen band. Without a doubt, however, it had more stories. . .lots and lots more stories.

Did you know that during that first decade here, when there was no church yet, if a family wanted attend Christmas mass in LeMars (a dozen houses maybe, still a very, very small village), they'd start from home at midnight. With oxen, it took hours to go twenty miles. They had no horses--they were too poor.

Lots more stories. Lots and lots more stories.

For June 6

 

I didn't know him--couldn't have. He was killed four years before I was born. For years I wouldn't have known his story any more fully than I might have known the stories of any other veteran who didn't return from Europe or the South Pacific, any of 16 million Americans who served our country in World War II. 

I knew my dad spent the war years aboard a tugboat, pushing destroyers hither and yon in the South Pacific. Eventually I heard my step-father talk about his long trek from Normandy to Berlin in the motor pool, where he and his gearhead buddies repaired everything that should have moved and couldn't--jeeps and tanks and dozens of deuce-and-a-halfs. Those two were the only WWII stories I knew in even modest detail.

Gerrit Ter Horst's story slowly came into focus years later. Ter Horst was an Orange City boy, a farm kid who'd be 100 years old on September 4 of this year. He went to Christian School and Northwestern Academy, where he graduated in 1935. In telling the community the news of his death, the newspaper makes claims Orange City-ites would want to hear: "He was faithful as a church member, a member of C. E. and the Sunday School of the First Reformed Church."

On January 23, 1943, in Virginia, Pvt. Ter Horst began his first fourteen weeks of military training, along with a buddy named Ken Jacobs. The two stayed together for more than a year. From Virginia, Gerrit went to a Replacement Depot in Pennsylvania, and then New York. In late May he and literally millions of other GIs, including my father-in-law, set sail for Europe, the war zone. In the entire time he served, Gerrit Ter Horst was never furloughed, never saw again the beloved he'd left behind. 

His stone in the Orange City cemetery carries the date of his death as June 6, 1944, D-day, 75 years ago today. 

Pvt. Ter Horst--one of the letters calls him "Gerry"--served in the Combat Engineer Corps. From this point on, the story I can tell is based on lore passed along through the years.

Somewhere on the English shore, Gerry likely spent the night of July 5 wide awake, conscious of something huge in the wind, something far bigger than anything he could have imagined. The skies were so full of planes you could walk on them. 

Sometime during that night, he may have been one of the troops who saw General Eisenhower come through the lines. In all likelihood, surrounded by buddies, some of them he couldn't have known, all of them friends, buddies, he was likely as ready as he could ever be, his ample gear in perfect condition. He had to be scared. Everyone was. His imagination probably wasn't broad enough to conceive the scale of Operation Overlord. No one could.

I'm guessing Gerrit Ter Horst knew his mission: to lay in whatever explosive devices he could and thereby destroy the iron works Nazis had set into the shoreline just off the beach. Get himself out of the landing craft and take out whatever mines or barriers he could find, quickly and efficiently, to make the invasion possible.

Hundreds of landing craft rolled up to the Normandy shore that day, thousands of GIs looked to secure a toehold on beaches heavily fortified by German armaments. Many in that very first wave never made it to sand, dozens--maybe hundreds--drowned. Those who stumbled and sloshed to the beach faced withering machine gun fire that shredded the front. The U. S. Army suffered 2500 casualties that morning on Omaha Beach, all of it 75 years ago today. 

Pvt. Gerrit Ter Horst was one of those who didn't make it to shore, one of those who knew the invasion only from the water. The story goes that he no more than stepped out of the landing craft and caught the bullet or bullets that killed him. That he never accomplished his mission doesn't make him any less a great hero. 

I have a stake here, telling this story. One of the beloved Gerry Ter Horst left behind was the woman he had pledged to marry, a woman that newspaper story names as Bertha Visser, the 1940 Tulip Queen. On June 6, 1944, I'm sure it was impossible for her to visualize any future at all without Pvt. Ter Horst, without Gerry. 

But a telegram from the Army ended that dream long before it could have come true. I have no idea how Bertha Visser endured that sadness or dealt with what had to be her own immense grief. That she may not have been alone in her deep sadness didn't mean that what she'd suffered wasn't devastating to heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Just a few years later she married my father-in-law, the gearhead from the motor pool, and had a daughter, who became my wife. Bertha Visser Van Gelder was my mother-in-law.

When she was alive, I couldn't help thinking it would be inappropriate to ask her how she dealt with that horrific loss. Did the man she married fill what must have been her grievous emptiness? Did his presence send the shadows away? How long did it take to forget? Did the sadness ever leave? How did you find comfort?-- all questions I never asked.

What I know is that one day a young woman once betrothed to a man who died in the shallow water off the Normandy beach took some time before she gave her sister the job of going downtown Orange City to step into a jewelry store and talk with the jeweler about returns, showing him the ring. It was time to remove that diamond from her finger.

I like to think it was the jeweler who thought it a good idea for her to exchange that ring for a beautiful desk clock she could set anywhere in the house, one of those nautical clocks that chimes at any hour if you so choose to allow it so to do. 

That clock is ours today. It doesn't chime; it's not plugged in. But it has a very special longer and sadder story than anything else among our most treasured possessions. 

Even though he never had a day of furlough, even though she hadn't seen him for a year and a half, even though she likely never forgot the day the telegram came or what she was doing or how short her breath must have come, all these many years later, I like to think the story that nautical clock still tells is only somewhat about D-Day or war or death itself. 

More to the point, I'd like my mother-in-law's grandchildren, and theirs after them, to know that old, otherwise indistinguishable nautical clock is really all about life, even very much about their own.

_________________ 

This story appeared here first two years ago. It's so important, I thought I'd repeat it again on this anniversary of D-Day.

Reading Mother Teresa--An Open Calvary

“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. 

There will be no more death” 

or mourning or crying or pain, 

for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21:4

That week there were parents in Moore, Oklahoma, who didn’t sleep because their children, their darling school-age children, were trapped somewhere in what little was left of the school where on Tuesday morning, when the bell rang, they’d been sitting in their desks, innocent as doves.

What those moms and dads were going through that night is beyond imagination. They couldn’t dig through the rubble themselves because only search-and-rescue people could. All the while, those parents knew the death toll was rising, and no one, right then, had a clear idea where that toll would stop. They could do nothing, absolutely nothing, but cry and pray in a home that must have seemed horrifically empty, as it turned out to be.

And God didn’t appear to be helping either. Rain was forecast that next morning, lightning and thunder, even hail. Nothing destructive. On what was left of the streets of Moore, Oklahoma, there was nothing but ruin. Rain wasn’t what the searchers needed, nor was it what their kids needed if, by some miracle, they were still alive beneath walls that were no longer walls.

We’ve got kids in Oklahoma. They’re no longer kids, really, but, for a parent, I suppose, they will forever be kids – mine. They made it through a horrendous weather week in the Sooner state.

Friends called us, concerned. We could tell them, joyfully, that our kids were untouched, if anyone in the region can be “untouched” by what happened. People knew the elements were conspiring to create a killer cocktail. If you live in Oklahoma, you live with tornadoes.

Here, on my way to my grandchildren’s school program that night, I got a call from my mother’s pastor, who told me that my mother could use a call from her son because she was deeply concerned – quite emotional – about her grandchildren in Oklahoma. She’d been watching TV.

I hadn’t even thought of Mom. So I called her. She’s 94. She was worried sick, she said – a heavy dose of all that grief and sadness crept like a storm into her apartment. How could she help not thinking of her grandchildren?

Regardless of when you’re reading this, what’s beyond doubt is that more disasters, more death, has occurred since a mile-wide tornado ripped an Oklahoma City suburb into shreds in late May, 2013. To all but residents of Moore, what happened this week may well have been forgotten in the storm of tragedies that seem to be our lot as human beings, some of them self-inflicted, others acts of God.

Most everyone I know has a 9/11 story. Those two digits and the slash between them trigger images nearly universal in this country, if not elsewhere. Auschwitz is less a word than screen of images playing horrors before your eyes. Whole sections of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans have yet to be rebuilt.

On Christmas, 1984, Mother Teresa stood on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, totally overwhelmed by the poverty – “I have never seen so much suffering,” she wrote to Father van der Peet. This woman, who had lived her life among the poorest of the poor, claimed what she’d seen that day, the day of the birth of Jesus, was what she called “an open Calvary,” a place where “the Passion of Christ was being relived in the bodies of crowds & crowds of people” (308).

An open Calvary.

I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what she would have seen in the faces of those parents of lost children in Moore, Oklahoma, this week, another “open Calvary,” in the anxiety and then grief of moms and dads whose sweet kids never left Plaza Towers Elementary School, kids who that first night would have still been there – if they weren’t already with the Lord.

Some say it was the biggest tornado ever. A couple dozen people died in that storm, several of them children.

I’d like to say those kids belong to all of us, but they don’t. Mine are safe.

Theirs are part of an open Calvary all of us have seen at one time or another in our lives, but most of us will never forget.

God, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Paternity--a story (the denoument)

Two years ago, I was divorced. I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live.

Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl.

Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same.

But I couldn’t help thinking when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking.

________________________ 

A couple of notes on this story: 

On revisions: I knew where I wanted this story to be published, but it came back rejected, but with a suggestion. Some of the editors simply couldn't believe that the father could be that violent, that he would simply kill a kitten in his hands. I would have argued that farmers often have a different view of livestock and animals than the rest of us. 

The suggestion was that I find a way to foreshadow the way his killing the kitten. A friend of mine had once told me a story about beating a cow. His father had seen him do it, stopped him, and told him if he ever caught his son beating an animal again, his father would beat him. I deliberately put that segment into the story in order to foreshadow what eventually happens to the kitten.

On his father's killing the kitten: I wanted the reader to buy his doing that, and I felt that way because I remembered the way my father hit a runt piglet with a hammer when it was clear that the sow had birthed too many children for the number of spigots she had to feed them. He told me that what would happen to the runt wasn't pretty, that killing that little thing before his or her having to go through it was an act of mercy.

I'm not sure I believed him, but I also understood that I'd never stood in the presence of a dozen little piglets before--I had very limited experience of working with animals. Once when I was a kid, I had a dog appointed to be my responsibility. I failed that creature badly, and he had a short stay in our basement.

On the final scene: Clearly, Gary Dirks links his own personal problems to some things in his past; whether that's fair is a good question. But it's just as clear that, in retrospect, he remembers those moments in the barn with his father because he's seen too many kids in his job who've missed the discipline his father brought to his own life and that of his children.

A political story? Well, yes, I suppose it is, but only because the issue of abortion is so highly politicized. I've always been pro-life, but never fanatic about it. I certainly wasn't thinking of sitting down and writing a pro-life story when this story came to me. Perhaps my attitude is not that much different than the narrator's. He mentions abortion only in passing. His father's dramatic means of explaining to his son the importance of life itself is the testimony of the story.

The story's sturdiness and popularity may well be rooted in its being seen as a pro-life/anti-abortion story; but more important than that, or so it seems to me, is that the father's case-in-point about life itself is so distressing and therefore memorable.  

Paternity--a story (iv)

My father is a tall, gaunt man with very dry hair and proud features, a wide nose that, come summer, reddens almost daily. His arms are long, and his hands carry muskmelons as if they were softballs. He resembles the picture we have of his grandfather, the North Sea sailor who, eighty years ago, decided to leave the Netherlands and cut a life for himself and his family from uncut Dakota grasslands.

My father has mellowed in the years that have passed since that summer. He laughs now as he watches his own grandchildren play on the rope swing he hung, not four years ago, from the maple I remember as a sapling. Back then, with three teenage boys and six children in all, with thirty-five milk cows, with all of that life riding the back of the cold and dreary lakeshore seasons, he seemed to me to be driven. I remember unforeseen spurts of temper during harvest, nervousness in unexplained silences during early spring planting. Whole nights passed in October when he didn’t speak a word to my mother or to us.

Although he was a man to be feared then, it would be wrong to say that I was ever afraid of my father. He was to be feared the way he himself talked about fearing God. Each of us, I think, lived in a kind of awe of him. Darrell, the oldest, still wrestles him: if Dad says Darrell shouldn’t use herbicides, Darrell claims he’ll go bankrupt if he doesn’t. Andy simply follows Dad. He’s learned to live with him the way a good Marine feels comfort in a well-defined chain of command. I don’t claim to know about myself.

“You know,” he said to me that day when I’d climbed up in the mow beside him, “I always thought it would be Darrell and Gloria, the way they neck. I didn’t think it would be you.”

Little Jesse was loading the bales on the elevator that poked its nose into a square door maybe twenty feet off the ground. Trillian was helping him. We were putting hay up in the corners of the east loft, and the air was hot, full of chaff and dust, even though it wasn’t past ten or eleven in the morning.

“We’re all capable of it,” he said. “I’m not throwing the first stone either.”

He pointed me over to the place where he’d been packing. “Watch out for those kittens there,” he said. His stacking had uprooted four of them, gray ones--farm cats--certainly no more than a month old, from their nest, so he’d put them up beside a rafter that he likely didn’t mean to cover. The end of the yellow elevator, anchored with twine down to the wall, protruded from the open door behind him, sunlight cutting through the maze of dust in perfect geometric shafts.

“You know you shouldn’t have done it,” he said, not meaning it as a question.

I nodded.

When he didn’t hear me reply, he looked straight up at me.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Our bodies are the temple of the Lord,” he said.

I really didn’t feel any less healthy having made love eight times. It didn’t seem somehow like a desecration.

When a bale came up the elevator, it fell, end first, down to the floor where it grazed off the edge of another set deliberately below, then flipped over completely, landing flat, strings up, four, maybe five feet closer to the spot where we were trying to fill in the last of the holes in that corner of the mow. He’d grab them from the spot where they’d finally come to rest and heave them at me. Jesse was sending them up plenty fast.

“I’ve been thinking for hours,” he said, “and I just don’t know what to say to you that you don’t already know.”

I didn’t talk back. I was sorry for letting them down the way I did, but Cassie wasn’t really a girl I’d marry anyway, I thought. I’d miss her. I knew I would. But I didn’t love her, not love like you’re supposed to, I thought. Besides, she really wasn’t even of us. She was “lake people.” And she was leaving.

“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled down the open hole. “We’re finishing up up here.”

He motioned with his arm for me to climb up and take the bales from him when he picked them off the floor. His was the heavy work; mine was simply tedious: fitting them into what spaces remained.

“The church calls it a sin,” he said.

“I know it,” I told him.

“I don’t know if it’s a bigger sin if it happened a hundred times, or a little one if it happened just once,” he said, “but you and this girl, how often did you do it?”

I don’t know why I said what I did, but I told him it had happened four times. “But she let me do it, Dad,” I told him. “Every time. She told me that it was okay, that nothing would happen.”

“You and Adam,” he said. He picked up a bale and heaved it up to me off his knee. I was standing on a ledge of bales maybe four feet above him.

“Well, you saw her,” I told him.

“Sure I did.”

“She let me.”

“Slow down, Jesse,” he yelled again. Bales were piling up after flipping over the end as if they were riding a waterfall.

He pulled his handkerchief out and wiped his face. “So you just go and do whatever that thing you got in your pants says?--is that it?” He stopped and stared at me, bales still falling heavily to the floor.

I threw one in a hole without looking up at all. But I didn’t talk.

“Does it say somewhere in the Bible that it’s all just fine and dandy if the girl says yes? Is that a verse you read somewhere?”

I was up high, I remember. I reached up and scraped away cobwebs so thick with dust that they could have passed for yarn. But he stayed there at my feet, staring. I wouldn’t look at him.

He turned around and grabbed for another bale. That’s when I said, “Any guy would have done it, and you know it.”

“Does that make it right?” he said, shoving another one up at me.

I twisted around, keeping my feet straight beneath me as I picked up the bale and swung it into a hole at the corner of the roof line.

“What’s the big deal?” I said. “By football season it’ll be all over anyway.”

I’m not sure where that came from.

“Football season,” my father said, in a tone without emotion, as if he were repeating it in order to get me to verify that what I’d said actually came from my lips.

“That’s what I said,” I told him.

His face turned suddenly into some fierce mask. “It’ll all be over, will it?” he said, laughing in a biting, mature way that I’d never heard him laugh before, as if I wasn’t his own boy.

Behind him the bales kept falling all over the spaces where he could walk. He twisted around quickly, as if he had forgotten what he was about. He scrambled down two levels of bales to get to the window, then dug his knees into the hay to look outside. “Slow down, Jesse--didn’t you hear me?” he yelled, and he grabbed the end of the elevator and shook it. He stayed there for a minute, ripped four bales from the track and stacked them, one atop the next, to keep them out of the way.

Seated over there, he had to yell for me to hear. “You think it’ll all be over, do you?” he said. “Just like that--like the mumps. You think it’ll all go away, just like that. Like a sore knee, is that it?”

“What?” I said. “She’ll be gone. She’s rich. You saw her old lady. She’ll take care of the whole business.”

The floor at the end of the elevator was cluttered with bales. He pulled himself up from his knees, grabbed the end of the elevator, and twisted himself around it; but his foot slipped in a crack, and he twisted his back when he couldn’t keep his balance, finally falling to all fours. Just like that, like a slap in the face with an open hand, another bale came off the end and slammed to the floor over his twisted foot.

He came up swearing under his breath, something he rarely did, and he grabbed that elevator and twisted it, wrestled it loose from the knot Andy must have tied to anchor it, the chain jangling like loose bells, then turned it completely upside down, dumping every last bale off the track and to the ground between the barn and the wagon. “Now slow down!” he yelled again at Jesse.

“You don’t have to lose your temper,” I said.

“You shut up,” he said, pointing back at me. “You talk like a child--it’ll all be over--” he said. “It’s no big deal at all because once you make a touchdown nobody will remember.”

Anger and hurt twisted his mouth and narrowed his eyes, pouring out in something close to tears. “We’re talking about life here. Don’t you understand that--or is all you care about getting laid?”

I never heard my father use that kind of language.

“Life,” he said, and he put both hands down on a row of bales and climbed up several levels, lifting himself to the nest of kittens he’d laid at the beam. He grabbed a kitten from the pile that he’d found up there, took it in his huge hand and held it towards me like some circus magician, the kitten’s round head protruding between his thumb and forefinger, the rest of its body in his fist, small and gray with long fur. He raised it higher and higher towards me, then jerked down suddenly, as if he were snapping his fingers, as if he were a kid snapping a lead pencil in half. When he opened his hand, the kitten was perfectly dead.

I couldn’t believe what he’d done.

He didn’t say anything just then. He looked at me and tossed the kitten across the mow somewhere. If his eyes could have spoken, they would have explained everything, but his eyes were vacant. He just stood there and stared, almost as if I could be next.

“Dad--” I said.

“You two made a child,” he said, “not a kitten.”

And just then Jesse came up the ladder, almost crying himself. “I tried to get that old guy to slow down, but he just kept on going,” he said. “I tried.”

“That’s what you made,” my father said, pointing at Jesse. “And who’s going to be nice to him--who’s going to dry up his tears, Gary? You going to be there?”

------------------------

Tomorrow: Denouement

Paternity-- a story (iii)

Some summer nights a few years later, when I was home from college, I drove slowly down the lake road past their home late at night, maybe once a week or so. I’m not sure what drew me back so frequently to that path through the birch just a couple hundred feet off the lakefront--lust maybe, but I don’t think that’s the whole reason. Maybe I wanted to know that what had happened was all real.

But what I remember best about that summer is what happened after Cassie and her mother made their afternoon visit to our dairy--what I saw that night in the barn, and what my father said the next day, when he finally opened up.

He caught me once, maybe a year before, beating a cow with a hoe. I don’t remember the provocation anymore, but a milk cow, like a wife or a sister or a brother, can make you feel that bloody kind of hate you can feel only for those you live with, day-in, day-out. He came up from behind and grabbed me, lifted me off the cement and kept me up there until he’d stopped my thrashing.

“You ever do that again, Gary,” he said, “and so help me I’ll use that hoe on you.”

That’s all he said about it, ever.

When Cassie and her mother left late that afternoon, I went out to the barn, maybe a half hour after my father picked up and left in silence. I pulled on my boots just outside the parlor and unlatched the door. I was young then, cocky. I figured I’d take my licks and have it over. But I found him beating a cow that night, whacking away, the milking machine lying awkwardly in the gutter like some overturned turtle. He had a dowel he’d picked up somewhere, thick as his finger, and he was thrashing that cow like I’d never seen him do before.

When he saw me standing there where the rest of the cows were already stanchioned, he stopped, frozen in the act, a vacant, stunned look on his face. We both knew that nothing needed to be said, so we milked beside each other all night long and never spoke a word. I felt almost excused, as if what I’d done with Cassie was lost in some big harvest of sin.

The next morning we were out baling hay at the Trillian place, an old farm with hundreds of acres of land and a sprawling, ramshackle barn with 1904 painted just below the point of the eaves.

Today, the baler my father bought is obsolete because people say a crew of five or six makes baling hay too labor-intensive. Today, with the right kind of equipment, one man can do all the haying and never leave the air-conditioned comfort of his cab. Back then, haying employed our entire family, locked us up in dusty mows, forced us to gulp ice-cold lemonade from a common-cup canning jar, to work long, hot hours in stagnant air, thick with dust, and to talk to each other, even when we may not have wanted to.

When my father came on the job that morning, we’d already started up. I was stacking bales on the wagon when I saw his pickup roll into the yard. My brother Andy was driving the baler, while old man Trillian himself shuttled the first load back to the barn where he and little Jesse unloaded. In a matter of minutes, half hour maybe, Darrell rode out on the empty wagon and told me Dad wanted me to work with him in the barn.

My brothers hadn’t said much to me that morning. They knew what had happened the night before, but on the ride out to Trillian’s I’d found a corner in the back of the wagon and they let me be. Maybe they were disappointed in me, I don’t know. Maybe they were jealous. Whatever they felt, they didn’t say much. Maybe they felt as I did--it was all water over the dam. The way I saw it, Cassie was leaving. Now it was her problem.

__________________

Dad speaks.

Paternity--a story (ii)

I remembered Cassie and our child and my own father, who yesterday was out baling hay somewhere, just as he was during the Dutch Festival in town that summer I became a father myself. We’d had a New Holland baler for four years already and developed a list of farmer-customers long enough to call ourselves the Dirks’ family custom balers--my two older brothers, Andy and Darrell, and myself. The three of us usually set things up and took turns working in the mow or in the field; then there was the boss, my father, of course, who always finished the milking at home before getting out to join us; and my little brother Jesse, eleven-years-old maybe, who usually drove the wagons back and forth and loaded bales on the elevator. Three cuts we made some years; some years only two.

Nothing remarkable happened the afternoon Cassie and I told my parents about her being pregnant. Cassie’s mother was there too, the collar of her lavender blouse lying open, tastefully, over her tanned chest. When I remember now how strange that woman looked in our farm house--with all our fans churning up the air--I can see in the collar of that silk blouse what it was that determined, finally, my father’s nodding silence: he didn’t know how to talk to a woman who looked like she’d just stepped from a television screen. My mother, in her kitchen smock, smiled the way good women can when they have to; but my father sat and listened, his hands folded in his lap as if he were in church.

Cassie controlled the conversation. It was her style to talk, to reason out what must be done, and she did, with such coolness that she disarmed my mother’s usually hair-triggered emotions. She explained how she knew it was Easton tradition to marry a couple of kids at a time like this, but how that would be foolish, neither of us even seventeen and neither of us really seriously in love. She told my mother how she was going to move back to Chicago and have the baby there, and how she didn’t blame me for the baby because it wasn’t my fault alone any more than it was hers. It was, simply, what had happened, she said.

At that point my mother reached for her handkerchief.

“Of course, we expect to be able to cover the entire financial picture,” her mother threw in, as if it were the line that Cassie had allowed her to say.

At five, my father, taking his cue from the tolling of the clock in the family room, went out to the barn, sensing, I’m sure, that nothing more could be said anyway.

If I’d scour my high school annual I could come up with two or three other Easton girls who got pregnant that summer, but the story that unfolded in those cases would have been completely different. Once the news was out, Cassie packed her bags quickly for Chicago; as a result, the elders from my church never did visit with us together, as was the custom with the other shotgunned couples who’d violated the seventh commandment. Since she was already gone, they visited me alone, three of them, all men; and once they had nudged the word sin into and out of the conversation, we spent the rest of the night talking about football, my senior year upcoming.

I never saw Cassie again, nor the child--wherever he or she may be--if, in fact, that child exits. Cassie had money like I’d never seen. That was 1970, before Roe vs. Wade, but the Mikklesons had the kind of money that could pay for illegality.

___________________ 

Paternity--a story (i)

When, one Easter, I went out to the back of the barn to feed the rabbits, a job that supposedly belonged to my children, what was immediately noticeable was that the two babies were gone, just gone. I went back into the house, got ready for church, as did my wife and children, and simply couldn't bring myself to tell our kids--who were maybe eight and six--that the two bunnies the mom had were somehow not there. Couldn't do it. 

It was an Easter service I've forgotten completely because I was obsessed with those baby rabbits and what their deaths would mean to our kids, especially our daughter. 

When the service was over, I went home immediately and started to look around the neighborhood. They were tiny little things that couldn't have hopped off very far. They had to be close, if they were still alive and not somebody's Easter breakfast.

Amazingly, I found them beneath the deck of an old rotary lawn mower that stood behind a neighbor's garage. The lost had been found.

We'd had a sermon sometime earlier with a comparison that I remembered painfully--how the loss of a bald eagle in our society had become more tragic, in some ways, than an aborted child. 

I'm no pro-life fanatic, but something about that comparison stuck. And it's what is at the heart of this story, perhaps the most re-copied story of any I ever wrote. It appeared initially in the Reformed Journal, but got into school curriculums all over the nation. 

It's called "Paternity," and it's flush with autobiography. But no, I didn't get some high school girl pregnant. 

John Updike's famous story "A & P" features flat-landers absolutely flummoxed by young vacationing girls coming into a grocery store in bikinis. Something of that I understood, having grown up a mile or so from Lake Michigan. We called the foreigners "lake people" because they lived in a different world, a world far more "worldly" with ample bucks to support their leisurely way of life. They were exotic among the small-town Dutch Calvinists--you'll find that created here, too, in "Paternity."

Paternity

Somewhere today a woman named Cassandra Something-or-other is telling a little different story, I’m sure, because she was rich and likely still is.

What do I remember of her? Her hair--the way she turned her face up into the brisk, beach sun and swept the long bronzed bangs across her cheeks. The way she laughed, always hard and full, embarrassingly sometimes--for me, not her--and the way she never giggled, even though she was only sixteen. The sharp fortitude of her eyes confronting yours and never once backing down. I remember her body very well--and her tan, both where it was and where it wasn’t. Her face, really--the exact shape of her nose and the thickness of her eyebrows, even her lips--has gone from my memory, but a part of her will never go, the ever-urging boldness that knew no fear.

The fall of her sophomore year she and her mother moved, all year round, into her parents’ cottage on the lake. She was what we called “lake people.” I was a townie. Her father owned a Chicago company that turned out fifty fiberglass boats per day. My father milked thirty-five cows. Twice she’d been to Europe. I’d been to Indiana three times to Bible Camp. She was going to college in Vermont, she said, because she hated Chicago, where she’d lived for her first fifteen years.

We were both sixteen. I was an athlete, tall and muscular from years of farm work, and blond, like a beach bum, from the burning sun and long hours in the alfalfa fields that still lie like storybook meadows between Easton and the woods that belt the lakeshore. I wanted her all right, but she just wanted. That was the difference between Cassie and normal Easton girls. They never really wanted. Cassie did--sincerely and truly.

Once I told her how--when I was a boy--we’d seen a train flatten a penny we’d laid on the track. A half hour later she stood, holding a handful of unruly hair to keep it out of her face, while only ten feet away a huge freight exploded by. The miniature football I’d hung on a chain from my rearview mirror swayed in the lurches of the coal cars across those ties, and I was in the car fifty feet away; but she never raised her eye s from the spot on the steel where she’d planted a nickel herself.

I wasn’t really Gary Dirks to her. I was merely the boy she wanted. Eight times we made love. I could probably still list them, by place and degree of success, in order. And we really didn’t quit each other, at least not until the next summer, when she became pregnant and went back to Chicago to have our baby.

She had no desire to marry me, the son of an Easton Hollander, a small dairyman. So she finished high school in Chicago, I suppose, and I never heard from her again, just as she had promised. When I say she left Easton, I don’t mean that her parents forced her to return to Chicago. She simply determined herself that she would leave, then told her mother of her plans. Back then I thought of Cassie’s having free will in the theological sense my father talked about “free will”--as the opposite of being predestined for salvation, almost as sin.

Yesterday, I sat on a crowded curb in my hometown as a Dutch Festival parade marched up from the memory of my sixteenth summer in Easton, one float after another, the Lions Club’s old black and gold, papier-maché feline still mounted on the same crepe-papered hayrack, First Presbyterian’s same black Bible open to the same John 3:16. Only the faces of the queen and her court had changed; even their Dutch costumes seemed handsewn replicas of what I remembered. My children were off on the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel because a silly, small-town parade doesn’t entertain ten-year-olds who have been brought up on cartoon excesses. So I sat there alone and watched another parade too: a score of Easton high school kids dressed down for the sun, performing for each other. And I remembered who I was back then, sixteen years ago.

_________________________ 

Tomorrow: 

Memorial Day

I don't think there's a marketing department in the local American Legion, nor will there be any time soon. The events on Memorial Day morning are planned by men in Legion hats that look just a little bit silly on paunchy old guys forty years or more beyond their years as a fighting force. Every year, the Legion does the very same thing on Memorial Day morning all through the region, which is why there's at least some unacknowledged silliness.

I've attended a bunch of them in a bunch of small towns, and they're not all the same. Yesterday's featured the reading of the names of every last community vet--twice!--both by the conflict in which the man served and the cemetery in which they are buried. It went on and on and on, and yes there were a few women too.

There's always the Pledge and the National Anthem, and a speech, sometimes a classic American Jeremiad, a sermon by a preacher who says that if America would only turn to the Lord, we'd begin a new reign of glory. Just a few years ago, I heard a preacher and National Guard officer berate a President so sharply I couldn't help assume he thought himself god almighty. 

Generally, the "doings" are not upbeat. Most often, they end with "Taps," a musical ritual frighteningly familiar despite the fact that nobody hears it often at all. Yesterday the far off echo was performed by a kid so young his father stood beside him for moral support. 

If there's a committee that puts the Memorial Day Doings together, the job isn't huge. Basically, once they get a speaker and pull together a color guard, all they have to do is make sure there are enough blanks for a 21-gun salute. 

It seems American Legions aren't growing. The Second World War grabbed hundreds of men from communities like those in Sioux County, Iowa, and sent them off to a bloody war against a mustachioed madman and a Japanese tyrant who shared an insane desire to rule the earth.  WWII was an absolutely horrible war that, in retrospect at least, is somehow easy to love.

Not so Korea. Not so Vietnam. Not so Iraq, Not so Afghanistan. 

I suppose that's why Memorial Day ceremonies are run these days by fewer and fewer old men, old guys who insure the program as well as its tone remain as predictable as the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall.

Only the most conservative churches haven't jazzed up their worship these days. Many long ago stopped singing from hymnbooks. Guitars abound. Organs collect dust or have been quietly removed. Drums beat new rhythms. What used to be is no more in churches--we've got to keep the kids so we're all contemporary.

But Memorial Day ceremonies in most villages and towns haven't changed--and likely won't, next year either. 

Quite frankly, I like that. The medium is a goodly part of the message here--no glitz, no show biz. What happens on Memorial Day morning in lots of small towns is exactly what has for fifty years. Things are deadly serious because giving one's life for one's country can't be jazzed up. You can't be but cute about sacrifice. Death will never make splashy entertainment.

And that's good. Those old guys with the blue Legion hats are deadly serious because dying in defense of freedom--and giving up a son, a brother, a mother, a spouse--is deadly serious business, as righteous, finally, as anything we can do on this earth.

My grandma insisted the family attend Memorial Day ceremonies because her only brother never returned from France in 1918. She wouldn't miss the graveyard "doings," as she used to call them, and she didn't think her children should either.

I'm not a veteran. In May of 1970, I went to Washington D. C. to protest the war in Vietnam, to march in the only parade I've ever been in. 

But on Memorial Day morning, I always try to make it to ceremonies in some community where ordinary men and women give patriotic speeches, read the names of fallen heroes, and salute the flag, where little kids await the peal of gunfire by covering their ears. 

I go because my father spent three years on a ship in the Pacific and my father-in-law was gone just as long in Europe. I go because Grandma wants me there, wants me not to forget her brother, his life and his death, things she never could.

Reading Mother Teresa--What she talked about when she talked about love

In Raymond Carver’s story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two couples, in what is shaping up as to be an all-nighter, soak themselves in far too much drink while discussing, painfully, what they believe love really means. The discussion turns deadly serious and cold sober when one of them, a cardiologist, talks about an old couple whose broken bodies (they’d been in an accident) required full-body casts. The old man grew depressed, the doctor says, not because of his injuries or hers, but because that body cast’s eyeholes simply would not allow him the simple joy of seeing the women he’d loved for so many years.

For a while at least, that love story shuts down their grueling conversation, but my guess is that most retirement home care-givers might just yawn through it because they experience similar stories firsthand almost every week, elderly husbands or wives who drive in to convalescent homes and faithfully attend their spouse’s every meal despite the fact that their spouses couldn’t pick their mates out from a police line.

Dedication. Undying love. Incredible selflessness.

One of the amazing ironies of our culture is that we reward those who take care of our most needy so pitifully.

I don’t know why exactly, but lately – when I’m out on the acreage trimming trees or mowing the lawn or doing almost anything – old gospel songs haunt me to the point where I find myself singing through them on some kind of unending loop. Like this one, almost unknown today, but a part of a repertoire I can't forget:

Give of your best to the Master
Give of the strength of your youth;
Clad in salvation’s full armor,
Join in the battle for truth.

The conceit that runs through that old hymn was apropos for kids, like me, children of war vets: the Christian life as a battle. We’re not so keen on the backdrop any more, which may explain why that old hymn has largely disappeared, save in the sealed vault of my memory.

The Sunday school lesson it teaches is a good one – since no one can serve two masters, the scripture says, give of your best to the master, give of “the strength of your youth.”

Dedication. Undying love. Incredible selflessness.

I can’t say it quite as graphically as Mother Teresa did, but she practiced a devoted sacramentalist faith that’s unlike mine, for better or for worse, faith constructed on what she tasted in the blessed sacrament, a rite that infuses the language she offered those who served in her army of care-givers, language like this: “Let the poor and the people eat you up,” she told the Sisters, a vastly more dramatic take on the old hymn’s commanding admonition.

Let the people “bite” your smile, your time. You sometimes might prefer not to even look at somebody when you had some misunderstanding. Then, not only you look, but give a smile. . . . Learn by heart you must let the people eat you up. 

I don’t think it’s possible, really, to offer a way of life that is more patently un-American. We pass along God’s peace most bountifully when we give ourselves away, when we dedicate our undying love in selflessness that’s so profound as to die to we are, or want or wish to be, in the name of the Lord Jesus.

“Let the poor and the people eat you up,” she said. What she meant was, to them, be the body and the blood. To them, be Jesus.

Dame's Rocket wherever I look

 

Apparently, I'm not supposed to love this stuff. I wish I didn't know that. 

Yesterday, I took a river walk amidst a gorgeous day, mid-seventies, some wind but not much, the open azure sky like a huge crown all around. I took a walk that fits me just about perfectly: a mile to the river, a mile (by another route) back. Maybe a half-dozen fishermen were out at the South Pond, but not much luck going on among 'em.

I'd taken an old camera I hadn't used for ages, just to give it a workout. I didn't take my phone. . .and should have because when I got down to the river banks, glorious mobs of magenta were exploding on both sides. I had no idea they'd be there. 

 Look at those purple troops over there on the other side.

They're called Dame's Rocket, and, if the on-line sources can be believed, they're horribly invasive, their rogue beauty as ample as dandelions and just as dang meddlesome. I wish I didn't know that.

They seemed to have disappeared from ditches last year, or at least I didn't notice them as notably as I had before. Seems as if it's been a while. But this year, like the cicadas, they've come back with a vengeance that's bountiful. 

They somehow escaped people's gardens, I'm told, where they've held down a beloved place for hundreds of years. These days, they're very happily on their own, and down by the river, at least, they're legion. 

They've been beloved in the evening especially, when their fragrance is released, just another facet of their beauty (some think they're an aphrodesiacs--no, I didn't take any home). Anyway, the word is, they've departed a thousand garden plots to populate places where wildlife carry their seeds along to unceded territories (or so the story goes). And they're hearty:  those lugged-along seeds have no trouble finding a place to open. This year--viola!--they're back and, doggone it, they're wonderful. They give the riverbank some shocking technicolor.

When I walked away, I could have kicked myself for not toting a better camera or at least my phone, because none of these shots do the huge stands of Dame's Rocket justice. They're luscious. Purple suggests the robes of kings and queens; yesterday the riverbank was robed in royalty. 

I'm supposed to believe, supposed to testify, supposed to confess that all that blessed periwinkle is a plague, a creeping abomination. 

That's what I'm supposed to say. So I did, right? But it's oh, so painful, even for a Calvinist. 

Sonnet 18 and me

It's shameful for me to say ill of her. She did her darndest to make high school English a class we would find endearing. She was not some crypto-Nazi disciplinarian whose name--Goehring--defined her character. When I look back on her class so many years later, I have to admit she could have been worse. But we called her "Granny Goehring"--an indication of our estimation of her relevance to our lives.

That day, it was Shakespeare, the sonnets, the love sonnets in particular, Sonnet 18 specifically. And who could blame us anyway?--I mean, there was a ball game that night. I'm thinking Random Lake, but it could have been Howards or Plymouth, or Chilton--who knows any more? There was a game and the guys in the back, close to the door, me among 'em, were not one bit interested in Sonnet 18 or most anything Granny Goehring might have served up that morning, fourth period, senior English.

I don't remember exactly how it started because I wasn't listening, I was talking. I wasn't so much being disrespectful as I was dedicated to the day's vital task--preparing for that ball game. We were a fair-to-middlin' team, emphasis on middlin', but we were dedicated, and, if my memory serves me right, we were determined to win. The subject of senior English class that morning was the ball game that night. Granny Goehring was on Sonnet 18, but she was silver-haired irrelevance.

She'd likely taken a warning shot or two across the bow of our indifference before she took finally could tolerate no more and took close aim. When she did, she went after me, even though I'm quite sure the quarry could have been any of us. She wanted simply to break up the distraction. She loved Shakespeare and hated our disinterest. "Jim Schaap," she said, "I want you to take a seat up here at the front of the room."

If I'm not mistaken, she did more than point--she walked over to the desk and rapped its surface. She was irritated. It would take me another five years or so to understand why, but she wasn't playing around.

I don't think I was a "naughty kid." Distracted from Shakespeare's sonnets, or whatever the menu brought up that morning?--sure. Yes. We had a ball game, after all, and the old lady had no sense of its importance. She never went to ball games.

I didn't fight her demand. On my way up front, I walked slowly, at high-school hot shot pace, but not delinquent; I was following orders. I didn't try to fight or make a scene. I spilled my books on the desk up front, crawled into it, and opened my lit book. She let me know the page number, and then began in her immensely mimic-able sing-songy, utterly feminine voice besides.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:. . .

No one's memory is perfect, and what I have created of this story through the years may differ from whatever recording exists others may have in storage--if indeed anyone does; but it didn't take long for me to forge a course of action. It was her m.o. to take a couple of lines, stop, and create a question we might consider, and my behavior came as a revelation right then. I committed myself to do something I'd never, ever done in any English class--answer questions, not just one of them either--all of them! Answer them as if I was interested.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

"Class, what is Shakespeare referring to when he says "the eye of heaven."

Piece of cake. I'll get her goat by raising my hand and answering. Old lady'll be thrilled. I did, and she acknowledged it. "He's talking about the sun, Mrs. Goehring," I told her, maybe a bit like Eddie Haskell. The look on her face said it all. She was as shocked as she was pleased.

"And 'every fair from fair sometime declines'--what's he talking about there?" she asked that question to the rest of the class, but I was all in. I thrust my hand again into the discussion, with grunts for emphasis. I simply could not easily be avoided.\

"Yes, Jim," she said, and I went into what I thought would be a summary of what this guy, Shakespeare, had in mind about some really hot lady friend. "He loves her," I told Mrs. Goehring, or something to that effect. "As great as a summer day is, it's not going to be around forever and therefore not nearly so great as she is."

Years later, I would tell my own high school English classes that one key toward understanding Shakespeare's sonnets is that they're built in sonnets. In high school I had no clue about that, could have cared less.

Granny Goehring, now greatly pleased, went on:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

I get this, I told myself. I'm on to him. He is one lost lover. What he's saying is really kind of rich, that she's still alive wherever people read this poem. Summer days are sweet--sure; but this sweetie of his comes close to being eternal.

And there's this. Hold on to your seat. She's so beautiful or wonderful or sexy or hot or whatever, this guy says, that she'll never really die as long as people read about how beautiful or wonderful or sexy or hot she is.

What follows is what I'd learn to call that final couplet: two lines at the end that wrap up the package and get the job done.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Wow. Gob-smacked me right there in the middle of my chest. Get this: he says as long as people live, as long as they read over these very words, she'll be alive--in our imaginations, we'll still have her. Oh, my word, I thought.

So that day in senior English I kept answering questions, one after another, in part because I the answers to what Granny Goehring seemed so dang obvious, and in part because I knew the guys at the back of the room would be rolling in the aisles, me jabbering away up front about love poetry like some brain from the Honor Society.

But I had a sweet and pretty high school girlfriend, and we'd been a thing for some time even though she went to school down the road where our rivals quite regularly took us to task on the basketball floor. She was a cheerleader for our sworn enemies, but still, to me, a sweetheart whose bouncy little skirt, often as not, set my heart aflame. I knew love, or thought I did. I wasn't yet 18, but oh, my word, I understood that poem. I most certainly did. I just loved it.

I didn't say so, didn't tell my buddies from the team, who were greatly entertained by my antics that day. But I'd learned something that would, that day, change my life: I understood exactly what William Shakespeare says in Sonnet 18. Exactly, because in some podunk town in southeast Wisconsin, 400 years later, a bunch of bored ball players read through a poem that did exactly what the poet said he'd do--create some great lines that would make her divine. Wow.

The next day, fourth period, I had a choice: sit up front and acknowledge what had happened in my heart and soul, or sit in back. I sat in the back. 

No matter. Sonnet 18 had done irreparable damage and charmed the course of my life.