Benny died of old age here and is buried out back. Hope he doesn't think we deserted him.
Stuff in the Basement
Morning Thanks
Thursday, April 03, 2025
In praise of a place we called home
Tuesday, April 01, 2025
Round-tripper
The idea is to get to the other side of the garage. Since I sold my truck, the middle stall stays open. I'd parked the car, slid myself out, and used the car itself for ballast as I moved around it towards the ramp that runs up to the door. But there I stood, between me and the other side maybe ten feet or twelve.
I had the option of going back into the back seat of the car to fetch my walker, but I'd just about had enough of that thing. People are surprised and happy about me and my walker, but I stagger around like a drunk with it, especially when I pull my bod around the car to get to wherever it is I want to go.
Sometimes I wonder--I swear it--whether some cop on a slow day might see me creeping around and just assume that I spent too long holding on to a bar stool somewhere, but it's standard procedure if I'm to get out of the house, which, believe me, is highly desirable for anyone who, like me, has spent a goodly chunk of the last six months without, well mostly without, four walls.
So, as I said, the idea is to get to the other side of the garage. That's it.
From the right front fender to the ramp is maybe six feet--I can almost reach it, so I take one tentative step with my right foot and lean until I'm there with right hand.
Big deal. the idea is to get to the other side of the garage.
There's a bunch of stuff in a bundle and some lawn tools hanging from the wall along with--wait for it!--a baseball bat. That's right, a baseball bat. Calling that beast a baseball bat is like calling me Hemingway. It's skinny, short, and may well be the only wooden bat in Sioux County, Iowa.
But it'll work, so I inch my way across a couple of boxes, and grab it from its place on the wall, a sandlot bat that survived hundreds of ball games kiddy-corner from the house I grew up on the blacktop at First Reformed.
I can only imagine his joy when he thought about his old buddy dropping by blind to a gift he couldn't give to just any human being. I was the only guy. So sometime during that visit, he gave it up, smiling with his own generosity, and it's been mine--again!--for the last thirty years.
So the old bat wasn't a perfect cane, a little short for me and lots heavier than the aluminum one I sometimes use. But I thought it wonderful. The thing got me no farther than the other side of the garage, but that's all I needed.
Once more, these days the Schaaps are packing up, trying to throw things away. We got a helping hand from a big flood last spring that took out our first floor and lots of possessions. We haven't considered a total. It's too heartbreaking.
And I'm left with a ton of things that'll have to go now, as we move to a smaller place, an abode for the elderly.
Among the memorabilia, an ancient wooden bat, dressed up to make it look like a Louisville Slugger.
That's what I wrote on it when I was a little shaver with visions of baseball grandeur, dreaming of getting to be a high school star. I played third base in high school, catcher in college, and never used that old bat. Even if I had wanted to, my old friend packed it along with him for all those years. Besides, it was the kind of thing made for First Reformed parking lot.
I wanted to get to across the garage because ever since I became a cripple, I've spent too much time in the house. I just wanted to sit down for a while before I went in.
So there I sat, me and this ancient sandlot baseball bat, inscribed by a kid reaching for dreams. I ended up playing ball until I was 55. Loved it.
But it'll go now. It's hung around with nothing to do for years. Still, for a while I sat there enchanted with the dreams drawn out with black magic marker. It's a beautiful, wonderful blessing to hold and swing and dream again of lacing a fastball straight out over the pitchers head into far left center.
Today, that old bat delivered a round tripper that led only to the other side of the garage. The old guy got me where I wanted to go.
It's going to be left behind, but somehow I feel better knowing that on the Saturday before we move, that scrubby Louisville Slugger, signed by Jim Schaap, got me where I wanted to go.
Monday, March 31, 2025
Sunday, March 30, 2025
Sunday morning meds--from Psalm 42
“My tears have been my food day and night,
while men say
to me all day long, "Where is your God?"
When my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in
leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not
going. I loved high school teaching because
I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write,
I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.
Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern
suburb of Phoenix. I’d been hired
precisely because I was a
Christian. I was also male, experienced,
and newly outfitted with a masters degree; those were also factors. But, illegal or not, I got the job on the
basis of my faith. The district
interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too. That’s another story.
Only two years later, a college teaching offer in my
hand, I decided to leave. When I told
Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched. He looked
up from behind his desk and shook his head.
“Why would you want to go there?” he said. “Everybody there is just like you.” He slapped that desk lightly with his
hand. “Here, you’re really different.”
Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line still reverberates
through the echo chamber that is my soul because he was right. We’re not talking about the difference
between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the
air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.
But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new
suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than
spending those years in an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge
of the Great Plains. I chose the
monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.
I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve
never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my
distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?” Hasn’t happened—and won’t. I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses.
Had I stayed in urban, public education and American
suburbia, I’d know people who would ask me the very question David that burns
in his soul. Some of them are still
friends. Last summer I got an email from
an old teaching buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my
faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about not having any himself.
But I’ve been cloistered for fifty years here, and those
few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line.That doesn’t
mean, however, that I don’t hear those burning questions. They rise, instead,
from inside me somewhere; and what I’m wondering this morning is this: if I’d
have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard
supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside? What would be the pitch of my own personal
faith?
Those questions are
here, even in the cloister, and they are packaged in the same taunting voice
David heard. That voice I swear I hear, that burning question, even in a cloud
of witnesses.
But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em. Only by grace, do I come anywhere near to having a faith that is equal to that task.
Friday, March 28, 2025
Thursday, March 27, 2025
A stranger in the bushes
They say it all happened in the spring of 1864, Adair County, Iowa, somewhere near the river, the Middle River. the eastern part mostly, where mulberry bushes and other such got to be profuse back then, thick as a bramble mask. One hundred and more of the county’s finest men were somewhere below the Mason-Dixon, fighting beneath a Union flag. Up north there was an Indian war. The time and place was primed for dark and abundant fear, the kind that send people home to hole up.
That kind
of fear grew out of depredations reported by pioneer farmers or their wives,
who wandered out back in the face of dawn to tend the animals only to discover
the animals required tending no more—bloody and slain by a monster who’d
obviously ran them down before pouncing and ripping them apart hideously.
Farmers in
Jefferson and Harrison townships warned others about the fearful slaughter, but
this monster did his dastardly work at night, thus avoiding the pioneer
farmers.
The beast
itself was first seen along the Middle River in Harrison Township, a harrowing
sighting, people reported, because none of the witnesses had any idea what the
animal could be exactly—big as a donkey, people said, red kind of, and behind
him in a bloody wake far too many slaughtered cows and pigs.
For reasons
known only to the beast, he rather quickly picked up his things and moved, now
to Jefferson Township, where the depredations included colts, calves, sheep,
and more hogs. The people of Adair County were daily more distressed.
Then, the
first dramatic sighting: Womenfolk were out gathering gooseberries when they
quite silently came upon the beast, sunning himself on the dead branch of a
tree maybe twenty feet off the ground. At that moment, he offered one of the
women the first glimpse during his stay in Adair County. She and the others
retreated quickly, but the woman who laid eyes on the beast said only that the
river monster was bigger than any dog she had ever seen
The men
organized a hunting party to flush him out of his lair in the bushes, and they
did—but he avoided their attempt to end his depredations. Eventually, he simply
disappeared once more, but only after helping himself to forty pigs, some of
which were 100 pounds.
Now listen
to the end of the story in the history of Adair County. It’s too good not to
quote:
After this he was seen no
more, nor, we believe, heard from,
but the
fear that he might be still lurking in the timber was for a long time the cause
of alarm and annoyance and deprived the good people of Middle River country of
many-a gooseberry pie. The animal was probably what is known as the American
panther.
They were likely right, but this “American panther” goes by as many as eighty names, the most familiar of which is, likely, puma or pooma or pyuma—all of which are acceptable pronunciation. Apparently, the American panther is not proud about what he’s called because he goes by jaguar and mountain lion and, literally, at least eighty other names. That’s right—8-0.
Just once in a while—maybe once every dozen years or so, a mountain lion, a puma, a jaguar, finds their way into our world, wandering far, far away from home to scare the pants off of you or me or cousin Al, if Cousin Al doesn’t shoot him first.
For the record, as far as I know, not a one has shown up in Harrison Township, Adair County, Iowa, either—not a one. But, then it’s likely nobody bakes gooseberry pies any more either. It’s a shame really.
But every once in a while they do show up, usually young males looking for love; so, the next time you’re enjoying walking along a thick hedge, vigilance is nothing to sneeze at.