Tuesday, at the DAHM

Hamlin Garland

Old Jane Ripley grew so tired of her nightly dreams that she finally decided to act on them. Ever since they’d set up homestead, she and her husband had worked themselves half to death to prove up their claim. No matter, she says, she’s going home to visit her family. It’s been a dream for way too long.

The idea of her taking a vacation on her own is plum crazy, her husband tells her. Leave the homestead and take a train all the way to New York state? —all by your lonesome? He won’t hear of it, he says. He can’t imagine such a blame foolish thing.

And so begins “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip,” a comic short story by Hamlin Garland, whose tales of rural America, mid-19th century, are classics. “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip” is a hoot—part Garrison Keiller, part cartoon, one story a collection titled Main-Traveled Roads, by Garland, who, as a boy in the 1860s, lived just outside of Osage, Iowa.

Not long ago, on a trip to the other side of the state, Jim Schaap, I stopped in Osage, where a museum docent told me I could drive by the old Garland homestead. It was still there. When I did, I got interested, once again, in Hamlin Garland.

The Garland home--Osage, IA

We do have a history. Fifty years ago, when I decided to try my hand at writing, I started with little stories I found moving in the histories that emerged from Dutch-American settlements throughout what Garland called "the middle border." To be able to talk about life in the 1870s, I needed to understand what farm life was on newly created homestead. Boy's Life on the Prairie was a great help in establishing the "givens" of the story I needed to learn, the infrastructure required to get historical fiction right.

When I read “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip” and finally stopped giggling, I figured the story would make a rollicking good readers theater piece: a gutsy old woman wanting to visit family a half a continent away, a plan her old grouch of a husband simply can’t abide.

When the Dutch American Heritage Museum Board discussed the whole crazy project, they thought enlisting Jeff and Karen Barker to read the main characters would make an unforgettable evening’s entertainment. We asked, the Barkers said yes, and you can smile your way through Garland’s story for yourself at the DAHM, Tuesday, July 11, and 6:30.

The Barkers require no Orange City introduction. Karen Bohm Barker and Jeff Barker, Emeritus Professors of Theatre, taught at Northwestern for over 30 years, impacting countless students. In their retirement, they are building a home—Barnabury—on Karen’s family farm in Illinois. Jeff is writing a book on parables, and, among other ventures, they teach a Doctor of Ministry cohort at Western Theological Seminary.

It’s wonderful to have them back for this “world premiere” performance—a classic old short story redone as readers theater and performed by masters of stage craft. Ought to be fun.

Tuesday, July 11, at 6:30, at the Dutch American Heritage Museum, located at 120 3rd St SW in Orange City.

Visitors

"What places do I really have to see when I'm here?" I asked the woman behind the desk at the Osage Visitor's Center.

“You must see our church,” she said, smiling.

Clearly, she was at least part Osage. I liked the way she’d pushed her church at me--"our church," she said. I knew she meant the tribe's. 

"Our church," is Immaculate Conception, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a red-brick cruciform built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

When I drove up, the doors were locked, but the office posted a number so I called. A woman with a pleasant voice told me the church was closed for the holiday weekend, but she'd meet me anyway. That was nice, and I told her so. 

By the time she arrived and we got inside, a half-dozen others had joined us, a family from Colorado on their way to a ball game. Thought they'd stop, they said. So, there we stood in the nave ready to tour. 

Our silver-haired, dark-eyed docent was linked to the region by blood, by DNA, she said. She was part Osage, but born and reared in Dallas because many years before, her grandma had left Osage County, afraid of being murdered. 

I’d read the book. I knew the story. 

"You know what happened around here a century ago?" she asked the folks in football jerseys, who shook their heads. She turned to me. I'd met her only five minutes earlier. "You tell them," she said pointing. It wasn’t a question. It was a command. 

I was stunned. The story was so much hers. It took me weeks to begin to believe that she chose not to tell it because it was so much hers.

A rash of unsolved murders in the early 1920s brought in the fledgling FBI in to investigate multiple deaths of Osage men and women who’d become unimaginably wealthy when oil gushed from wells drilled into tribal lands. In 1925, little Pawhuska, Oklahoma, had a Rolls Royce dealership--and dozens of dead Indians. White men murdered a gallery of Osage people, mostly women, for their money. The story our tour guide wanted me to tell the tourists is as unbelievable as it is horrifying, explained most recently in David Grann’s Killers of Flower Moon.

When I was finished, the tourists had trouble knowing where to look. Our tour guide thanked me with yet another smile and pointed immediately at Immaculate Conception's pride-and-joy, a stained-glass portrait of a Dutch-born priest named Father John Shoenmakers bringing the divine light of Christ to the Osage people. She was proud to say that her people needed Rome’s special approval for that window because it featured Native men and women who were still alive back then and were therefore, by some papal edict, not to be so honored in stained glass. The Osage won that tussle; so today, if you visit Immaculate Conception, your guide will most certainly point at the north window with great pride.

The Colorado bunch had to get to the game, they said, so they left.

Once I was alone, my guide walked me over to the far side of the church to show me a dedicatory note at the bottom of one of the stained-glass windows, the one endowed to honor the memory of a woman named Sybil Bolton. She pointed, stared. "She was one of them.”

Sybil Bolton was a young Osage girl who learned to play the harp at the exclusive East Coast boarding school she’d attended. Back home, at the age of 21, Ms. Bolton died mysteriously with her baby at her side. She was buried in an ermine coat.

The silver-haired docent said only that "Sybil Bolton was one of those who was killed." 

The continuing horror of the Osage "reign of terror," almost a century ago is that the whole community lives with it. Great-grandchildren of killers go to school with the great-grandchildren of victims. It’s not a story that's easy to hear, nor easy to tell.

Next week, Martin Scorsese will be there, as will Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and, most recently, Jesse Plemons. They will be making a movie. When it comes out, keep an eye out for the stained glass at Immaculate Conception.

I can't but wonder if a movie with the billing created by those stars will help the people of Pawhuska talk about what happened 100 years ago. Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Justice, like forgiveness, is most often at the far end of a long and winding road.

 ___________________________

This post is an essay I wrote for The Twelve, a blog created by the folks who create the on-line Reformed Journal. I'm putting it up today because the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon has been released. The film will be in theaters in October. 

George Washington Trump

Look, I sort of like this. It's silly and vainglorious--sure. It's ripe with ego, of course, but show me a politician who doesn't suffer some kind of ego problem, and I'll show you a loser. For a July 4 greeting to the nation, the meme is cute--in its own stupid way. I'd like to think it bespeaks a man with a wholesome dash of irony--"Look at me, America, I'm today's George Washington." Yuk, yuk.

The problem is, Trump is not yukking. The man believes the hype, the meme. He sees himself as leading a rebel nation to victory over a repressive and criminal "deep state." It's a bloody horror he's taking on to keep his disciples (actual disciples, mind you), the throng hungrily awaiting freedom from evil. Trump isn't putting this George Washington meme up to be cute. He wants his MAGA elites to see him as the last great American patriot, the last hope.

It's nuts. Not long at all after pleading not guilty in court, ex-President Donald J. Trump told some lame-brained admirers just outside his Bedminster, New Jersey, that Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.”

Biden, a Marxist? Trump is not an idiot. He wants to awaken a century-old fear of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" being destroyed by communism, by communists, as if Biden and all the Democrats in the country are closet commies. Meanwhile, in his estimation, his buddy Vlad is "a brilliant man." In Trump's madness, Putin is not a communist, Biden is.

Welcome to the upside-down world of the Republican's out-front candidate for the Presidency.

Trump's red baiting is old as the hills of the Missouri. My dad caught a good strong whiff of it 75 years ago when a Wisconsin senator named McCarthy made wild and phony accusations about all kind of people--communists, in films and in governments, who, behind closed doors, together plotted the end of American democracy. Fear works. It sells tickets and hungrily gathers contributions. Trump is our latest peddler of McCarthyism.

But the great sadness is the fact that people like Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley and Randy Feenstra don't raise a voice against Trump's evil madness. They don't want to lose. They know President Joe Biden is no commie. But they keep still, and the whole American political scene begins to stink to high heaven.

Both Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon finally lost credibility when fellow Republicans came out of hiding, when conservatives couldn't help but note the evil behind the lunacy. That as yet hasn't happened. Ernst/Grassley/Feenstra all are steadfast in their silence.

Meanwhile, yesterday, for the Fourth of July, Trump himself celebrated his glory by passing along this meme. Isn't it a beauty? Isn't he a great man?

On the Fourth with L and C

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon on board? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy. Two of them--using lodge poles to pole the beast up, or else pulling the boat and pirogues upriver with ropes—were truly back-breaking. Pulling that thing against the current while marching along the river's edge had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were embarked on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And by telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that cannon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absences, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom! --a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown today." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch cannon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

Transparency

For six years of my forty years as a teacher, I taught in public schools--two by way of a teaching fellowship at the university, and four at public high schools, one in rural Wisconsin and another in suburban Phoenix. I graduated from a public high school, but also a private, Christian grade school.

 

Otherwise, all the rest of those years I taught college kids who'd enrolled in the private, Christian college who sent me my check at the end of the month. Our kids went to private, Christian schools for their entire lives, and three of our five grandchildren attend the same schools their mother did years ago. 

What we've contributed, money-wise, to private, Christian education would astound those who don't share commitments the two of us have held. I can say that safely because I'm quite sure it would astound me.

I am an advocate of the justice argument, the idea that choosing private, Christian education should not prohibit citizens of these United States from getting a fair share of the national educational dollar. I've always supported economic help for those who choose to send their kids to private, Christian education, and would also support it if the parents were Islamic or Jewish or Native American.

Yesterday, in its Sunday editorial, the Des Moines Register, the state's most read newspaper editorialized on Gov. Kim Reynolds' advocacy of state funded private education by loudly proclaiming that the governor and her government needed to exercise her own promised transparency on questions related to state-funded private education. The Register is right.

First, the Register insists she needs to be transparent about "How many Iowans applied for vouchers, how many were approved, and what resident school districts do they come from?" People deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.

Second, the Register says people need to know "How many approved applicants have actually been accepted into private education?" Private education is "private" because it does not, by law, have to accept and enroll all applicants. Public education does. It would be helpful for taxpayers to know when children are turned down for enrollment--and where and why. 

Third, the Register says that Iowa needs to know "how many students receiving vouchers are enrolling in a private school for the first time, and how many are just replacing personal tuition payments with taxpayer-funded vouchers?"

I can't help but think the Register is right. Governor Reynold's haste to pass her private education laws into service was seen, by some, as rushed. But her government's silence about the easily discernable facts the Register insists need airing is, well, stinky.

Iowa, like many state legislatures, is dominated by super-majority Republicans, who have more on their minds than justice. What makes me shivver is the whole package of Republican principles these days, the stock-in-trade of MAGA Republicans: book-banning, for example, and over-zealous management of curriculum, not to mention teacher name-calling. Some of those who trumpet private, Christian education these days do so because they are convinced, as MAGA Republicans tell them every day, that teachers are despicably WOKE or communists or fascists who hate America. Have a look at the ex-President's last speech--any of them.

The degree to which Gov. Reynolds trucks with the MAGA crowd is the degree to which I lose trust in her and her government. The Register scores some points with yesterday's editorial. Over this Fourth of July weekend, it serves us well to remember that adage from the freedom scrapbook: "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, 

the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space. Literally, there is nothing there. There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try.  I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, an area most Americans see only from the relative comfort of a jumbo jet. But then “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” says curmudgeonly Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest.  When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day.  Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific. It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor, I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces. Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

 

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that Psalm 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Seems not so ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.  Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it was a blessing.

 

Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling everything and leaving an icy glaze over the world. I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s f-stop. 

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.

Hamlin Garland (i)

On Tuesday, July 11, at 6:30 p.m., the Dutch American Heritage Museum, in Orange City, will be treating a crowd to a readers' theater production of "Mrs. Ripley's Visit," the first short story Garland wrote for a collection he eventually titled Main-Travelled Roads. We couldn't have better readers--Jeff and Karen Barker, long-time theater profs at Northwestern, will be reading Mr. and Mrs. Ripley.

This post was published here a year ago, after I returned from a visit to Osage, Iowa, where, for a time, Hamlin Garland's parents homesteaded. 

________________________ 

She rose from the cow’s side at last, and, taking her pails of foaming milk, staggered toward the gate. The two pails hung from her lean arms, her bare feet slipped on the filthy ground, her greasy and faded calico dress showed her tired, swollen ankles, and the mosquitoes swarmed mercilessly on her neck and bedded themselves in her colorless hair.

You're thinking Cinderella maybe? Good guess, but the setting is no match--no court, no Prince, no overfed grumbletonian sisters; instead, as you can tell, we're in farm country, ours, circa 1850, Sim Burnes' wife, or so Hamlin Garland tells us in the very first line of the story "had never been handsome, even in the early days of her girlhood."

So who is this sexist pig Hamlin Garland?--and why, pray tell, should I tune in to the schluck's misogynist rants? Maybe you shouldn't. Millions don't. Hamlin Garland has largely disappeared from high school lit texts, even though at one time he won a Pulitzer Prize and was thought to be one of the finest writers of his time.

These days, however, he's no longer read, in part because the subject matter he chose--subject matter that chose him--is the hardscrabble settling of the region he called "the Middle Border," a composite of the very westward movement his own family, like so many others, traveled mid-19th century.

Garland was born in western Wisconsin, grew up in central Iowa, and moved as a young man to the Dakota Territory, as his father and thousands of other Euro-Americans bullied their way into Native lands. Richard Garland followed a well-worn script during the era of Manifest Destiny, moving ever farther west as land opened, always looking to nail down a haunting dream of liberty--or something. That he never quite found it is in the record his son, Hamlin, left behind, a whole bundle of stories that define and describe the dreary and depressing demands of the life of a homesteader, especially on its women.

But then, it's good to remember that just breaking new ground was no chore for a sissy. Pulling that plow through the uncut earth demanded the kind of hard work that wore on both man and beast. But 160 acres almost scott-free, and all you had to do was put in a tree or two and an outhouse, improve the land a bit--and you had five years to do it? That seemed just too good.

Garland's descriptions of what it took--and what it took out of his mother especially--are hardscrabble all right. The men in his stories don't ruin their wives and kids by spending hours on end slumped over a stool at the saloon, they make life miserable by demanding unending, back-breaking work round the clock. On a hundreds of townships in what we called, back then, the great Northwest, far more dreams went bust than prospered, some by heat and drought, but most because of the back-breaking work required to build something permanent on ground the Native people white folks displaced never attempted much more than a mobile home they called a tipi.

Garland fashioned the saga of his own experience in the channel already created by at least some of the intellectual forces of his time. Among those who remember his writing, he's often considered "a literary naturalist," one of a whole "school" of writers who couldn't help believing that human beings were powerless losers before the government, or Wall Street, or even endless foul weather. We're all "Under the Lion's Paw," which is how he titled one of his most-read naturalistic stories.

The kind of naturalism Garland adopted doesn't make fun reading. Dire and dark, it gets whiny finally. You get tired of stories that follow characters who get stepped over or stepped on no matter which way they turn.

Garland the naturalist is a Garland for English majors, but not a Garland to love. When, in 1922, after decades living in American cities, he won the Pulitzer, the prize wasn't for stories of a dismal life. He won for memories he drew of those days on the Middle Border, breaking new ground, stories of the work he thought he hated, tales of a boyhood out in the middle of an jaw-dropping nowhere.

A Son of the Middle Border won him the kind of wide attention as a writer that he hadn't achieved--it's an autobiography, of all things. A kind of sequel, The Daughter of the Middle Border, won him the Pulitzer.

He cut a place for himself in the annals of American literature, not by disparaging his own boyhood, but by doing exactly the opposite: by honoring it, by making it sing.

Far away from the Middle Border, he came to came to understand the uniqueness of his childhood, which prompted him to respect it, and finally appreciate it. His Middle Border things offer an encyclopedia of life in the region where we live, mid-19th century.

In the museum of Homestead National Historical Park, there hangs a photo of a bumpkin farmer trying to cut a rug. It's goofy. It's hilarious. It's even a little embarrassing (look at the women behind him). Aside from Fred Astaire, there's something unseemly about old men dancing--old farmers especially; but I can't forget the picture, and I can't forget it not because its so tacky but because it happened: there was life out here on the plains, hard work or not. Read Hamlin Garland. Read Willa Cather.

Maybe they shouldn't have, but out here in the middle of all that openness, sometimes people danced. That too is our story. You bet it is.

Bog Walk

Bit of a tribute. Took a stroll yesterday through "the Big Woods, north of Bemidji's own Lake Bemidji to a bog (rhymes with hog), a delicate place no one I know would want to live, closest thing to a rain forest one could probably find east of the Rockies. Loved it. Easy hike, but I still sweat madly due to deep woods humidity (at least to a prairie dweller!).

For those of us who are un-Minnesotan, it just so happens that what you're looking at here is the officially recognized State Flower, a little sweetie of an orchid that blooms for only ten days. Their numbers are few, but we were blessed to be able to appreciate their glory out in the bog.

A little break up north

For close to two decades, I've left a warm bed early in the morning, come downstairs, snapped on the desktop, called up the website, and said something, lots of things, right here on the page. I don't know how long that will continue. in fact, there may be a break starting tomorrow--may, I say, because I do have some plans. 

Just thought I'd mention it because we're leaving in just a couple of hours for a respite (excuse my language--we're retired, we have no need of a respite) in northern Minnesota. For many years, a week or so "up north," as they say, was a blessing, twice a year too; first, early summer, and then again to do the color thing, first week of October.

In anticipation, I'll put some pictures up. Tomorrow is our anniversary--51. Last year's Arizona extravaganza was memorable. This year's will be far more silent and significantly shorter (not to mention less expensive), but as much a joy, just the two of us. Here's some shots, "up north."

I'll try to snag some similars in the next couple of days. Don't hold your breath. This is a quick trip. 

I'm anxious to get on the road.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 42

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, 

my Savior and my God.”

In verse three of this psalm, some shrill voices are taunting, as they do again in verse ten; but unlike so many other songs in the book, in this one, Psalm 42, the enemy is not the psalmist’s Godless enemies, but his own miserable self.

What’s clear in the opening verses is that David—if he’s the author—has seemingly fallen into a chapter of Saul’s life, Israel’s very first king, the potentate who wrote the book on depression. His darkness is self-imposed: “Why are you downcast, O my soul?” is not the question David would ask himself on a battlefield. The war here—or so it seems to me—is within. “Why are you down in the dumps?” is the way Eugene Peterson puts it.

If Psalm 42 were a short story—which it isn’t—I might be willing to hazard this analysis: in verse six, we’ve arrived at the climax, maybe not the dramatic climax of the narrative, but the technical climax, because, somehow, we get the sense he’s turned the corner, that the conflict has been bested.

Right here in the psalm, this narrator—emotionally enfeebled—rallies, not because someone tells him he should, but because he tells himself he should. “Put your hope in God, fool,” he argues and then commits: “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” He’s gritting his teeth, pushing himself up by his own spiritual bootstraps, rallying himself as if he were the captain of his own cheerleading squad.

Were some student to hand me this story, I’d likely red-pencil, “I’m not convinced” somewhere in the margin, and then scribble in something even more widely scribbled in on student stories: “show us, don’t tell us.”

But when we read on, it seems clear that the answer he commits to in this verse doesn’t shoo the darkness. Psalm 42 is not at end. The whole poem may well be a technical climax to the big story. I like that idea, even though there is no satisfying denouement.

It seems to me that what David is calling on to cure himself is what he already knows but may have forgotten or simply not mustered. What he now believes will deliver him from the darkness is not an elixir he’s buying from someone else because he already knows the way to health and joy.

You can almost feel him trying to bully away his personal demons: “I WILL YET PRAISE HIM,” he tells himself, doing everything he can to refresh his own faith, telling himself—a mantra even—something he knows so very well but has somehow lost.

He’s not asking God to ride in on a heavenly steed; he’s not asking to be saved. Instead, he’s telling his own darkened spirits what he already knows but has forgotten or stopped believing—that his only hope and comfort is in the Lord.

The joy of David’s poetry, read thousands of years later in a world David himself wouldn’t begin to understand, is our blessed realization that a human heart beats in every line. These are God songs, divinely inspired; but to read them as if they weren’t the work of a human soul is to miss half the inspiration.

In Psalm 42, David knows the truth he simply can’t muster. Every believer who’s ever been “down in the dumps” has been there, feeling exactly that pain. Every one.

David knows, but somehow he just can’t. The psalms are ours too. The psalms are us.

Morning Thanks--Milkweed

"They got a lateral root," my dad-in-law told me, explaining just what we were after. He had me out to the farm to walk beans, the kind of job, back then, only traditional farmers did anymore, before spraying. His only daughter had married a teacher who knew nothing about farming. But he could walk beans. A nine-year-old could walk beans, after all. You didn't have to have a college degree to walk beans. I told him that if he'd ever have anything for me to do. . .well, you know. So he called. "Wanna' walk beans?" he said. I couldn't say no.

Those lateral roots came up when he was talking about milkweed, a bully of a plant easily distinguishable between and through much more reserved soybeans.

Dad stuck a homemade machete in my hand, a hideous thing that would have made a great weapon in some cheap murder mystery. It was hot, I remember, July hot in northwest Iowa, and the forty acres out there before us had never seen a tree. Still, for me, a teacher on summer break, being out there with him was a joy--hard work?--yup. But a joy.

Milkweed wasn't the only enemy. Waterweed, a gangly beast, shot up and out like a green skyrocket but still did a better job of mingling into bean rows. Dogbane also got whacked, even though, Dad told me, its lateral root--like its cousin milkweed--meant any bean-walking farmer could be playing whack-a-mol all summer long. But the number one criminal in the bean field was milkweed, which could grow to preposterous heights but never particularly difficult to pull or whack, largely because its life stayed down there only to return, time and time again, like something Hitchcockian.

Fifty years have gone by. Forty years ago, we used to see elaborate carriages mounted on John Deere tractors, those carriage seats filled with farm kids armed with chemical sprayers. They're gone too. Last year, the field behind our house got strafed by a yellow plane delicately laying some chemical over everything. 

Yesterday, years later, I spent a couple hours in the summer heat pulling milkweed again. When we bought a lot out here north of town, it wasn't your standard fare. We got an acre, which doesn't sound like much, but when you try to keep the weeds under some measure of control, you soon discover an acre ain't no postage stamp. 

The first year we lived out here, like an idiot, I dug up milkweed from along the road that goes past our place. I wanted milkweed for what I thought I was creating out back on that acre of Schaap land. I didn't tell my father-in-law I tried to plant some. But I'd heard, hard as it is to believe, that some naturalists in Minnesota were aying people for milkweed seeds because wholesale spraying had pulled numbers down mercilessly which threatened the fragile lives of monarch butterflies, once abundant, but no more so. I wanted milkweed--for the monarchs.

I got 'em, tons of 'em. Dad-in-law wasn't wrong. They keep coming back like idiot boxers. You can pull 'em or whack 'em. Just don't believe yo
u're rid of 'em.

And then there's this. I'm not old enough to have participated, but I've heard stories from northwest Iowa all the way to Michigan of kids, children, picking milkweed pods, putting them into whatever would hold the harvest, and then bringing them in to some designated place in town where they'd be collected.

"Two bags save one life," people said, because milkweed floss is water-repellant and naturally buoyant enough to be used for life-jackets--"two 20-pound bags of milkweed ponds for every life-preserver." 

I pulled out a wagon full yesterday, but the whole time I kept seeing little kids with big bags-full singing patriotic songs, maybe Sunday school ditties, as they filled those bags and saved the lives of men they knew from just down the street, uniformed men far, far away, on their way to Berlin. 

If you stop in the Alton dump sometime today and see a big pile of milkweed sitting there waiting to bull-dozed into the hill of grass clippings, they're mine. . .or were. They lost their lives because there simply is too many of them, far too many, which only means more in the future. I pulled dozens and dozens, but, trust me, the monarchs still have plenty out there. They'll not starve if they flutter down on our acre. I've got more, much more, I'm sure, than the corn field next door. I made sure not to pick them all. I saw one out there yesterday too--real prairie royalty.

But I want you to know that the wholesale murder I perpetuated yesterday--killing which will likely continue today--was not done un-feelingly. Milkweed is precious. There just too much of it.

I'm not lying. Thus, this morning's thanks is for the stories that played in my head yesterday afternoon, stories of milkweed. 

L and C and me--the monster Newfie

Meriweather Lewis got himself one great deal when he picked up a dog in Pennsylvania. The twenty bucks he paid for his furry buddy way back in 1803, translates to well over $500 bucks today. Seaman wasn't cheap. 

But if, today, he decided to pick up a real Newfoundland puppy--he'd pay twice that, even three times as much. I'm not kidding. An honest-to-goodness Newfie pup, not some cheap facsimile, could clean out a checking account. 

If he could've got by with a whippet or chihuahua, the relative heft would have had less of an effect on the corps, who ended up polling or pulling their whole package of goods up the considerable flow (five miles an hour--with no wind). I mean, Newfies can tip the scales at 200 pounds, although, given his circumstance, it's unlikely Seaman was that kind of load.  

In fact, he was a workout king who didn't just sit aboard the boat like Java the Hut. Oh, no--he was off and running every other day when Lewis, a scientist by nature and inclination, would go out looking for unforeseen treasures along the banks of the Missouri, treasures, like say, prairie dogs. No one had ever seen a prairie dog, so they shot one and stuffed it because Mr. President Jefferson wanted to know about every new thing dead or alive from this massive hunk of real estate he'd picked up for a song from the French. 

Newfies are huge, muscular, powerful, as good in the water as they are on land, maybe better--after all, they've got webbed feet. On land at least, a skinny greyhound would make a Newfie look like a sea turtle, but get a beast like Seaman in the water and he'll turn half-gator.

If Seaman was smart enough to write a book, his diary would look nothing at all like the those left behind by the Corps. Seaman's daybook would record foibles and adventures, strange and even fearful meetings no one else knew or experienced because--you won't believe this!--Master Lewis let his big guy run at night when the men were fast asleep from 16-hour days in and out of the water.

We know Lewis let Seaman snoop around because he says, once in a while, that he spent some time looking for his big furry friend, hoping Seaman wouldn't have taken on some grizzly or even a badger--they'd never before seen a badger either, by the way.  “His Shape & Size is like that of a Beaver," Clark reported about this strange new creature. "His head mouth &c. is like a Dogs with Short Ears,' , "his Tail and Hair like that of a Ground Hog."

That's a badger of course, not Seaman, as everyone around here knows, thanks to  the statue out front of the Lewis and Clark Center makes unforgettably clear. Seaman was a hundred pounds of huge, a monster who dwarfs the two humanoids figures behind him--"and what were their names again?" 

Lewis almost lost him once, far down the river and on the way back, in fact, when the Corps of Discovery was having real trouble keeping track of belongings. It was April, '06, and they were in the company of Nez Perce, who so admired things the Corps had, and used, and gave away, that they grabbed what they could when they could--including, one night, Seaman.

Lewis was livid. He sent out three men armed to the teeth, and told them in no uncertain terms not to return without dog. Took them awhile, but when they showed up, you couldn't miss that big, black Newfie, whose big red mouth was likely turned up into a smile. Stephen Ambrose says, "Lewis may have been ready to kill to get Seaman back, but the Indians weren't ready to die for the dog." 

I can't help thinking we ought to look for a major motion picture sometime soon, a Disney production, a rich collection of the stories only Seaman could tell--long, dark nights alone on the banks of the Missouri. Pixar maybe.

Not long after their return, Captain Lewis died, and when he did, people say, Seaman was so full of grief he refused to eat and died himself soon after.

So next time you're down at the Lewis and Clark Center, get a selfie of you and Seaman, that great monster Newfie.             

"The Whiz," a story -- vi

This story must be 25 years old or so, and when I now go through again what some call this denouement, I can't help but think that even when I wrote it, I didn't know what to do with the experience, how to understand the events nor my role in what had happened to a young lady with all those brains and talent. The import of Mr. Crotty's emotional breakdown still isn't clear. I was 22 years old, a first-year teacher. I was as blown away as the 6th hour class who wandered into my room that day, stupefied at what they'd just seen and heard.

The line between fiction and memoir almost disappears here at the end. The person you're listening to is no longer a fictional teacher in a fictional high school. The narrator is nakedly me. 

______________________

That was years ago. Today, Wilson Crotty might have gone to jail if the whole truth were ever told. Certainly, he would have lost his job. Instead, he may still be there behind his old desk.

I could have told Templeton everything Mel told me—if I would have spoken to him, he would have pressed her for every last detail. She could have told him too, but she didn't. She was powerless, really, and maybe it's taken me all this time to understand that. That may be why she never told the principal anything more than that this: "just now, in class, Mr. Crotty had a nervous breakdown."

Maybe I didn't tell Templeton because I was already starting to know Crotty's loneliness. Maybe I didn't tell because I was a teacher, or because I'm male.

Maybe I didn't tell because I wanted to protect her from the public slime of being seen as Friedli's victim, to keep a young woman already short in self-esteem, from the ignominy of a kinky association with a tall, gangly psycho, old enough to be her father, a man who was, by and large, a decent teacher, but like so many of us, starved, I suppose, for love.

Maybe I still can't see the whole thing clearly, objectively.

I got a card from her today. She sends something at Christmas every five years or so. This one came more than a month before the holiday season, along with a letter she sent out to dozens of friends.

It says she changed jobs now--and addresses--and that she loves the new job, writing software for banks, because it allows her to stay home more often and brings in even more money than the high-pressure marketing position she had with some Fortune 500 company.

The card's corners are decorated by little holly wreaths she drew in by hand, and she slipped in a snapshot of her kids, three of them, the oldest getting to high school age himself now. She knows it's early for Christmas, she says, but she knocked off two birds with one stone by announcing her address change and giving holiday wishes all in the same envelope, all with the same stamp.

"That's just like me, I know you're saying," she writes in the letter. "I don't know where in my life I've picked up all the frugality, but it seems to get worse with age."

It's hard to imagine the Mel I knew thinks about aging.

She signed the card with a fountain pen, but what is conspicuous by its absence is her husband's name. "Love," it says, "Mel, Brittany, Stephen, and Zack." No Burt this year. No husband.

There has been a divorce, it seems. It's obvious that she's suffered again, and I can't help but think I may be at least partially responsible for whatever travail she's not documented here. I'm the one who kept quiet as to what really happened between her and Wilson Crotty--protecting her, I thought, and him, and maybe even me, I suppose, when what she likely needed back then, more than anything, was her own innocence. I know that now.

She came back to me a week after Wilson Friedli lost it, came back to my room, and told me, without a tear, that it would be best if I not tell a soul what she'd told me in the cemetery. I never did.

On the picture, her auburn hair is cut short and neat, like an executive's. Zack's in a surf shirt, like every other kid in junior high. Stephen is leaning just far enough for you to see three little stripes shaved in above his ear. A long-haired cat flops uncomfortably over little Brittany's arm. The picture was taken on a redwood deck, and there's a lake somewhere beyond the pines. She's got a better job now, she says, and from the looks on the faces of her kids, they're not as starved for love as she was—or Friedli, for that matter.

I know this: to me, the joy on those children's faces says that we all have to get up and move—Melinda, Wilson Crotty, and me too, I guess. I ask myself this, as a Christian: isn't the great lesson of the gospel simply this, that there is hope?

I'm sorry, Melinda. I can't help but think I let you down.

Maybe it's not necessary for you anymore, but it is for me—it’s time I tell the story.

___________________ 

The last line isolates a theme present throughout the narrative but now rising as central to a story drawn from my memory of an incident that seems more than just sad. 

Flannery O'Connor once said that she didn't know what she thought about some idea or another until she wrote about it. Writing, some say, is itself a way of knowing, although in this case it was, at least for me, a way of knowing that I didn't know, couldn't know, would never know.

The Christmas card story is real. Some students remembered me for several years and sent cards; some are still my Facebook friends. One year, one of those holiday missives bore no record of the man who had been her husband. I assumed he was gone, out of her life.

That card prompted me to write "The Whiz." Could what happened to her those years before have anything to do with the failure of her marriage? And if it did, what role might I have played in that sadness? After all, Mel had trusted me enough to tell me at least a fragment of her horror.

The card triggered the story. I used to believe that, at least for me, every story required two foci before it could be attempted. Here, one focus is the day fifth-period math went off the rails; the other is my discovering no husband's name on the Christmas card. The tension created by those realities made me want to try to tell a story that remains, half a century later, a mystery, especially my part or role in it.

Museum people call the story of an artifact its provenance, the story of the item. Sometimes the provenance of a hammer or a dress made from a flour sack adds immense value to the artifact itself.

It's been a long haul. Thanks for listening.

"The Whiz" -- a story (v)

Chief Blackhawk

That which triggered my fictional attempt to tell this story is not something I witnessed. What I witnessed is what the narrator describes: 6th period, junior English, American Lit were stunningly quiet when they walked into the room that day because they'd just come from a class where they'd experienced something they'd never seen, something which became for all of us a very real "teaching moment." 

What you're reading is fiction, but were you to ask anyone who was there--as I did some of them almost fifty years later--they would tell you they hadn't forgotten. 

The next day in class, Mel stood in front with the chalk in her hand, trying to wrench the right answer from some stubborn puzzle on the board, and she wasn't getting it. But no kid in that room understood why not. There was more in her figuring than what she was scribbling, but when she didn't get it right, Wilson Friedli's best student, the one he'd opened up to the night before—when she didn't get the answer, he took it personally. It drove him crazy, and he blew his mind all over that classroom.

"I try and I try, and I try," he screamed. "I give my life for my students, and what do I get for it? Does anyone every appreciate me?" He screamed directly at Melinda.

The kids stared, petrified, at the assault.

"You can't believe how hard I work around here--how much I care."

He turned to the rest of them. "I want you kids to learn this. I want you to leave my classroom knowing this stuff. I give my life for this, and what do I get back? Does anyone ever say anything?" he yelled. "Does anybody ever say thanks? Do I ever get a yearbook dedicated to me? What do I have to do?"

He turned back to her, in silence. He caught himself for a moment, I guess, then looked back at the class, his eyes unfocused, as if he recognized none of them. He stepped back, felt behind him for the corner of his desk, and brought himself slowly around to his chair, still glancing back and forth between Melinda and the rest of the kids. Blindly, he sat down, stunned, they said, as if suddenly embarrassed. Then he dropped his head into his hands and started to cry very much out loud.

Melinda stood stiff at the board.

Then came up once more and looked at them again, eyes full of tears. "And you," he said to Mel, "you know what I mean. You—of all of them—know. And you don't even care."

Melinda ran out of the room.

The others stared blankly at each other as Wilson Crotty put his head down once again when he saw her leave. "I try and I try and I try," he said again, banging his fists on the desk. "I try and I try and nobody cares—no one," he said.

He pulled both arms up around his face and lay there on the desk bawling. The kids waited, looking at each other, wondering what to do. When the sobbing stopped, two of them, football players, took it upon themselves to walk to his desk--at least that's the way the story went.

They took hold of Wilson Crotty's elbows, got him to sit straight, then helped him to his feet. "You need to get out of here for awhile," one of them said, almost in a whisper. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Mr. Templeton met them at the door because Melinda, this time, hadn't simply run out of school.

*

Most of those math kids came downstairs to my room for sixth period English. I didn't know what had happened, but I could tell the moment they came in that something had occurred which left them speechless.

One of the guys who'd helped him told my class very respectfully how Mr. Crotty's arms were shaking when he held them. He explained how what the man had said earlier, yelled really, didn't make any sense to anybody, and how he'd aimed it all at Mel, and how horrible it must have been to be the kid who caught all that screaming. It was about the worst experience he'd ever had, he said, to see someone blow a fuse that way, just lose it right in public. "And Crotty too," he told the others. "Geez, I mean, who'd have ever thought it would be Crotty, you know?—I mean, I thought he was already crazy."

They giggled, respectfully really.

Melinda went home. Crotty did too, the principal driving him. He stayed out of school for almost five weeks, until the school board thought it would be okay to let him finish the year, psychologists indicating that it may have even been therapeutic for him to return to the classroom.

When he came back, everyone asked him how it was going—maybe it was the first time in all those years he'd been at Arrowhead that anyone had paid much attention to him, in or out of the teachers' lounge.

Mel never told anyone what he'd said or done the night before.

I was the only one who knew what was going on, and I didn't say anything either. Melinda never spilled a word to Templeton either. It was something only the two of us knew—the three of us, Crotty too.

____________________ 

Tomorrow--conclusion of the story.

"The Whiz" -- a story iv

The year--just so you know--was 1971, the spring of 1971, long before the advent of "Me Too." When Mel said she knew how the principal would react, Sandoval agrees, as if the outcome of any such abuse is fairly well cut-and-dried. What she meant was that the principal, a fine man, would have said, "I'll talk to him" and let the whole mess go right there. 

At this point in the story, we're in the middle of what today is recognizable as sexual abuse. That's a ready conclusion that was, back then, neither ready, nor a conclusion. What happened was precipitated by an emotional breakdown. Back then, no one would have thought of involving the police. Mel would not have been blamed for what happened, but Mr. Crotty would have been looked at with a certain amount of sympathy, a pathetic man. It's difficult to think him somehow a criminal; easier to see him as a victim of mental breakdown.

Back then, a first-year teacher, I don't know that I would have known what to do but suggest what this fictional me initially suggests Melanie do: "talk to the principal."  

But that suggestion changes because the story takes a darker turn. 

___________________________  

Mel blew a moist breath over her glasses and rubbed them with a balled Kleenex she'd pulled from her pocket. "It's my fault, I think. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a problem," she said. "He's not a bad man, Mr. Sandoval." She shrugged her shoulders as if the whole mess was easily remedied. "It's just that I can't be around him."

I wanted to touch her myself right then, I wanted to comfort her in my arms. 

"You think I should just quit the whole deal?" she said.

I don't know why I said what I did. I really don't. It was so much easier, I think, just to keep it quiet, to keep the lid on. I suppose I was thinking the same way she was, that there was more to lose all the way around if the truth were known. I was no Crotty, but maybe I even wanted to protect myself--I don't know.

"What should I do?" she said.

"Don't tell Templeton," I told her. "Just be sure that tonight he can't get you alone. Leave early," I said. "Do something."

"I can't," she said.

"Try," I said. "Just don't put yourself in any kind of position where it might happen again. Stay the heck away from him."

I suppose I assumed that the fear across her face, in the way her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed—I suppose I thought that was only natural. What did I know, really?

When we walked back to school, we walked through an uneven cadence of grunts, three or four guys in dirty practice jerseys lowering their shoulders and butting the blocking sled around the field, the coach astride the machine in front of them, yelling derisively. All the way back, I had Melinda on one side, almost silent, and the football team on the other.

*  

The next day, Wilson Crotty lost it all in math class. Melinda and two others stood at the board working out a simple problem, the rest of the class diligently computing through the sub-stratum of the same exercise in their notebooks, likely as not glancing up once in a while to see how Melinda, the whiz, was accomplishing something that seemed to the others impenetrable.

No one knows what had happened between them the night I sent Mel back to math contest practice. I don't know either. Melinda never told me exactly. But I can guess what happened because I think I understand something of Wilson Crotty. He likely tried to explain to Melinda once again how his soul was rushing headlong towards her in a way that he'd never felt before. He probably told her everything again, expecting her to return the intimacy. And he probably reached for her, expecting this very bright and mature student to be one of his students, at least, who would love him.

No one knows exactly what happened, and I fear the worst. Even then, I didn't really want to know. Maybe what I'm guessing is just the best possible face I can put on Wilson Crotty. I'm trying to excuse him. Maybe it's the maleness in me that I'm still trying to protect.

_____________________ 

Sex abuse is all about power, I'm told, but what was at the heart of Wilson Crotty's unchecked passions wasn't abuse; he didn't want to rape Mel. In the "Me,too" world, he was--morally, even criminally--abusing the power of his position when he reached for her, his math whiz, his prize student, maybe the only young woman in his tutelage who was thoughtful enough to understand the depth of his loneliness. What he wanted was to be loved. She knew all of that herself. Even Mel didn't want to break him.

When old friends of mine came to visit that year and stopped by the school to visit my classroom, they came away telling me that there were some real babes in those desks. I was shocked, honestly shocked at a sexual appraisal I'd not let myself make. They were my students. They simply not available. 

When I heard them go on about great legs and boobs, I was even a little angry. They were my students, after all, not sex objects. I didn't tell those guys as much, in part because I knew they were right; I'd made the same assessments.

I don't know when I'd determined that this story was going to be about the narrator. My guess is that I knew it going in. There's an old rule in fiction writing: the reader is going to side with (which is to say, to believe in) the story's "means of perception." In first-person narration like this, readers can't help but see the narrator as the central character, the protagonist.

In the next segment of the story, even though the action will have taken the elsewhere, I'm embarrassed to say the narrator will remain the central character. 

The events you'll witness tomorrow prompted, years later, my writing this story.    

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

 

One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, an event that’s not supposed to happen, certainly not to preachers. He didn’t blame her totally; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened, preacher or not.

At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

It seemed almost psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what exactly that pat expression meant in the context of unfaithfulness. I wanted him to unpack process.

By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said.  And it took work.  Like forgiveness.

It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself.  “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. 

 And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out:  “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? 

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form--and to himself.

In this verse, the story the poem reaches its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

 Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

 Sounds like Job.  Sounds like a lot of us, I'd guess.