Skilled Care: a story

This is fiction, 

a story composed of several incidents 

woven into a single narrative.

*   ~   *   ~   *

She'd drawn night duty, or asked for it, which would have been possible, I thought, given her personality. Connie was thorough and a great mom--from as much as I could gain by way of a selfie on her phone she was proud to show. From the shot, I guessed her daughter was maybe going-on 15, and a little bit sweet and innocent.

But if the picture said anything, it told me the two of them, mom and daughter, were a special kind of "together." Somehow, Connie had been able to keep herself straight, upright through years that threatened her as greatly as they had any of the other nurses post-divorce. None of the women I got to know at the Manor didn't love their kids--they all did. But some didn't let that love get in the way of their own understandable wanderings ..

"I don't know where he is," she told me when, gently, I asked one late night about Crystal's father, "and I don't care either." I'd hit the red button late, only because I'd paid for breaking the rules when I tried to get to the bathroom on my own some days earlier and fallen. I needed her to stand beside me with her iron grip on the girdle strap they all used to hold me up.

It was all matter-of-fact with Connie. She was straight-on, didn't try to be pretty. Some still small voice in the not-so-recent past had suggested to her that the time for rouge was some years back. Those years had stretched her nurse's smocks as  tightly over her midsection as her breasts. In only one way was she attractive--I always came away from her late nights with the confidence that she cared for me, deeply and honestly. No small thing.

Several empty rooms around mine meant the nights at the Manor were exceptionally quiet. It seemed to me there was little for Connie to do through late nights and early mornings, but what did I know about nursing?

"And this guy--her father?" I asked her. "What does he do for a living?"

 "I don't know," she said, and then, "It's been, you know, years."

All of that was flatly stated, no spit, no spite. But she pulled up a chair from behind my desk, as if tonight she had the time. "You got a belt, don't you?" she said, and I aimed her at the closet. 

Her daughter's father had wanted them to live in Texas, far away from her father, who needed her. But the guy didn't stay, so she and this little two-year-old headed back up north, alone, to Iowa. And that's the way it stayed.

She told me she'd been gripped by an odd incident when she lived in Texas, when she was trying to sell encyclopedias--that memory loosened a giggle. She'd met a man on a street corner, a man who was wandering. She thinks he had Alzheimer's, some kind of memory issue anyway. It was very difficult, she remembered, just getting his name. "I helped him to find his way home," she said. "I actually got him home."

"Tough?" I said.

She smiled more widely than I thought she could. "That night," she said, "I told myself that someday I wanted to be a nurse." 

There was more to her story than a disappearing Texas dude; others moved in or she moved in with them, two or three maybe I gathered; but none of them lasted. That picture on her phone showed two smiling women, mother and daughter. No one else.

She told me, almost in passing, that there was a woman in there too, in that parade of failures. And there was always her menacing father. 

"My father had PTSD--bad," she told me. 

It was hard for her to sit, so she got up and folded my clothes, laid them on a chair. "The only two things Dad ever seemed to care about was guns and drink." She spent years trying to keep him alive by chasing him down and keeping his room clean. 

"Vietnam vet?" I said, guessing his age.

She said he was never in a war, never in battle at all. In the military though.

"He's gone too?" I said.

She nodded. 

Maybe I went too far. Maybe she wasn't prepared open up to this old guy in skilled care. 

I said, "I'm guessing she's doing well in school--your daughter?"

"Crystal?. . ."

"Yes, Crystal."

"She's does very well." She dropped her shoulders as if for relief. A smile spread over her face. "How'd you know that?"

"I'm an old teacher--it's not hard to spot such things."

"Let's get you up," she said, and she came towards me with that security belt and put it around my neck hung it there before it dropped to my chest. There was only one way to get the job done. When she slipped it over my shoulders carefully, she  came in closer than most people normally do.

"I tell my friends that in a day I get more hugs around here than I get in a year otherwise," I told her.

"Call that 'a hug'?" she said, straightening that thick belt behind my back. 

Once we were ready to go, she shoved the walker into position. I had bare feet, and it was only a week or so since my fall right here at the edge of the bed. I struggled a little, but I hated the humiliation of not being able to stand so it took three thrusts to get my body up on the walker, but I did it. "There," I said. 

She grabbed my shoulders--I was taller than she was--and pulled her face close to mine, and spread her arms around me. Both my hands were on the walker. "That's a hug," she told me when it was through, and off we went to the toilet.

When she left, her silhouette stood against in the open doorways against the lighted hallway. She stopped for just a minute. "If you need me, push the button--I put it up there at the top of the bed."

She wasn't wrong. It was there. I felt it.

Nights at the Museum, Winter 2025 lineup

 

In a way, all that the weaponry rolling over the border was unexpected. The Dutch had spent the First World War out of the fray, neutral and largely unaffected. The neighbors’ little mustachioed pepper pot had claimed the night before the invasion that their neighbors, the Dutch, need not be anxious about German aggression . .. they lied.

On 10 May 1940, the German invasion of the Netherlands was begun. The meager Dutch army was no match for the German blitzkrieg, and thus the aggression ended by May 14, just four days later,

And so began the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, four long years of interminable suffering that began with the burning of Rotterdam and ended with Allied troops, mostly U.S and Canadian, ringing in jubilant liberation.

That four-years have to be considered one of the most difficult periods in modern Dutch history. One hundred thousand Dutch Jews were slsin, only 49 thousand remained.

Three books concerning the war years in the Netherlands, the years of the Nazi occupation, will be featured this season in the Books at the Museum program. One of those books is considered one of the world’s artistic treasures—The Diary of Anne Frank, a memoir/diary read and loved by millions. The program begins on January 21.

The second book may well be just as familiar, locally, Things We Couldn’t Say (1985}, the war story of Diet Eman, who, with her fiancé, worked in the Dutch underground trying to save Dutch Jews Hitler wanted exterminated. Things has a local audience because the Eman story was written by DAHM board member Jim Schaap, who has many tales of the book’s origins in his work with Diet (pronounced Deet) Eman. The February discussion of Things We Couldn’t Say, will be held February 18.

The March selection, also a diary. is less well-known—Etty Hillersum, whose war-time experience is unlike Anne Frank’s or Diet Eman’s. Hillersum’s diary An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941–1943, traces her growing appreciation of the life-changing vslue of selflessness. The March discussion will be March 18.

 Discussions will led by retired lit professors Dr. Keith Fynaardt (NW) and Dr. James Schaap (Dordt), and will begin in the museum at 7:30. Registration is $50 for three months of engaging book club meetings. This fee also covers beverages and light snacks.

To sign up, simply email the museum, dutchamericanheritagemuseum@gmail.com We look forward to seeing you there!

 

Sunday Meds from Psalm 28

 

“Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name”

 It is not beyond me to understand what David the poet is demanding here—and it is so forceful a demand that he makes it three times in two verses:  “Ascribe. . .ascribe. . . ascribe!” 

What he’s insisting is that mighty ones in particular (but all of us, methinks) lay their (and our) greatest accomplishments at the throne of the One who made those accomplishments possible. Give him the credit, the glory for what he has done, and never mind yourselves. 

The sacrifice he’s demanding is far easier to understand than it is to accomplish, of course.  Theoretically, who could argue with the rightness of what David is demanding?  Practically, however, I’d just as soon take credit for whatever successes I achieve. 

 I know what he’s telling us all to do.  I really do.

But the second half of this verse offers a whole new monkey-wrench:  give God almighty the glory that is due him, David says, the glory that he deserves.  Pardon the pun, but, really, how on earth can I give him what he deserves, when he will be eternally due so very much more than I can ever begin to give?  Seems to me that when it comes to the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, there’s no gift I could bring that can fulfill what David considers to be his or my obligation.

 Scratch the whole phrase up to poetic license. In the heat of creative energy, his soul overflowing with his own thanks, David scratches out a line that makes sense in terms of his emotion, even if, rationally, what he demands goes far beyond his and our abilities. There’s simply no way he or I can give God what he deserves.

But if he’s asking the impossible, what do I do?—just take myself out of the line up?  Even though I can’t do what David demands—and neither could he, I need to hear the prophetic command he gives us three times in two verses. I need to ascribe Him glory.

 “What shall I render to the Lord?” is a question that echoes out of another song, Psalm 116.  Some of us can’t really utter that line without hearing it set to music in an old hymn. I can’t remember well.. “How shall my soul, by grace restored,” the next line asks, “give worthy thanks, O Lord, to Thee?”

 It is a vexing question. How can I repay him for the life he’s given me?

 Benjamin F. Baker—I know nothing more of him—wrote that hymn, and the answer he offers, and the answer of Psalm 116, is, at least to me, no startling revelation:  

With thankful heart I offer now 

My gift, and call upon God’s Name;

Before his saints I pay my vow

And here my gratitude proclaim.”

 What God wants is our deepest thanks. What he wants is our gratitude.  

That’s all we’re due to give him, really—lifelong gratefulness, for deliverance, certainly, and for love shown to us in mountaintop experiences and even everyday forgetfulness.

 By way of Adam and Eve we chose to honor ourselves more than our Creator. It is a mark of our fallenness—mine certainly—that giving the Lord our best is as tough as it is. That may well be why David says it three times in the first two verses of Psalm 29.

 Give thanks. Always.

2024 flood -- our story

 

We considered ourselves veterans. We'd been through four flooding Floyds and really never got taken out of the game, never suffered at all, in point of fact.. Once when the river came up, it left about a foot-and-a-half in the basement, but we were renting then, and the folks who'd lived in the wonderful old place before us had pretty much cleared out the basement as if to offer a swath of the river a place too linger. 

Once upon a time, the river came up when we were out of town. Our new house was not finished then, but the water came nowhere close, we were told, so we dodged a bullet never really fired.

Three times we were home. It's more than a little stupefying to look out your wide northern exposure and see, out there beyond the blue, the lake you've always dreamed of just outside your back door.

We learned some things, like where to go for the very best flood info--the U.S. Weather Service, where pros analyze the data and make predictions that have been pretty much on the money--until the last monster, when they came up five feet (!) shy.

We'd been though all those floods before. We considered ourselves vets. We went to bed, not a nightmare in sight. The USWS says "no sweat." There's been a ton of rain, but we remembered more. The 100-year floods (we'd been through two of them) came lapping up at our stone pile, sixty safe feet out back. Once, we frantically drove to LeMars to buy a sump pump, but we never had enough water on the first floor to dampen a hanky. 

This June, we went to bed, to sleep. like a couple of rag dolls. What?--me worry? The Floyd will come up some, but we're a quarter mile away, almost. "'Night, all."

We considered ourselves veterans, until this time.

At five that morning, I woke up to some obscene sounds coming from the bathroom. What sounded scary looked just as bad. I went to the door to the outside deck, first floor. Trouble in river city, water, lots of it, lapping at the edge of the porch. 

I ran upstairs--after a manner of speaking. (it was June, but I was already gimpy, a cripple). By the time Barbara was awake enough to feel her husband's urgency and follow him down the steps to the same back door, the Floyd was right there. Had she taken a step out, she'd have had a soaker.

She was alone really--can't say that enough. I was no help whatsoever. We both thought immediately of that five-year-old (but never used) sump pump. It's wonderful that Barbara didn't marry me for my handyman skills, or we'd have split up about half a century ago. it was my idea to call our neighbors to make sure our sump pump was working. I did.

As we could have figured, he was there before I could put my phone down, pitched right in to make sure that pump was running, then ran back upstairs to tend his own flooding (he later told me he had no idea what was going on when I woke him,

Meanwhile, Barb called our kids. There was four inches of water right outside our door, a foot by the time they'd all arrived.

What happened after that was a no-holds-barred battle with the river, as our whole Iowa family attempted to haul what they could up the stairs and out of the maw of ever-rising river. Wasn't pretty, but neither was the Floyd just then.

More than anyone else, I could think; I should have guessed what was going to happen--look closely at the shot at the top of the page--but I didn't, and neither did anyone else. It was as if all the world was a lake, and we were alone in an empty fishbowl.

When the water level came up another foot or so, the door simply couldn't hold back the river; it blew out, or blew in actually. Thank the Lord it didn't break, or we'd have had glass all over the floor. What it did was admit a wave of dirty water so strong that my daughter and her three kids--one of  them pregnant--struggled to stay upright.

Lucas, hubby of the granddaughter with child, actually was knocked down and came up snorting from under water. We thought it was hilarious when it happened; now, it sounds terrible.

In no time at all, there was five feet of water throughout the whole first floor. We had considered ourselves veterans, but not for a river that rolled in five feet deeper than ever before.

(More maybe sometime. . .)

The Coventry Carol

Coventry, England, a city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, boasted significant industrial power when the Europe went to war in 1940, industries Hitler wouldn’t and didn’t miss. When the Battle of Britain began, a specific Coventry blitz started immediately and didn’t end for three long months--198 tons of bombs killed 176 people and injured almost 700.

But the worst was yet to come. On November 14, 1940, 515 Nazi bombers unloaded, and left the city in ruins. Its own air defenses fired 67 hundred rounds, and brought down only one bomber. It was a rout.

At 8:00 that night, St. Michael’s, a fourteenth-century cathedral, was destroyed like so much else as a city turned to ruin.

In the skeletal hulk of that cathedral, the BBC recorded an ancient hymn that originated in Coventry in the 16th century, part of a series of morality plays. The BBC’s Christmas program that night was broadcast from the heart of Britain’s “darkest hour,” and perhaps because it was, from that day forward, people remembered that ancient hymn in great part because they couldn’t forget it.

Today, that hymn is called “The Coventry Carol,” and it’s unlikely any of you would find it unfamiliar. The story of that ancient hymn is told in a Christmas tale whose shuddering horror is easier not to remember. After the birth of Jesus, King Herod, determined to hold on to his own kingdom, ordered the execution of every living male child under two years old. To imagine the anguish that flowed down streets all through the region is impossible.

In the old Coventry morality plays, “The Coventry Carol” was sung by three Bethlehem women holding babies sentenced to die. Together, those mothers create a haunting melody of multiple vocal lines. If you’ve not brought the "Coventry Carol" together with its own incredible history, you’ll never listen again without hearing the horror of its setting.

Bruegel, Massacre of the Innocents

The event traditionally called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” is probably best not spoken of on Christmas Eve. It’s way too dark. That most of us sing “The Coventry Carol” right along with “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town" may well be a blessing.

The “massacre of the innocents” shares the calendar with another historical massacre, this one a day’s travel west of here, a massacre on the open plains beside a creek with an strange name, Wounded Knee. That was exactly 130 years ago today, December 29, 1890.

For a year or more, Native people were gathering all over the West for a religious dance white men determined to be hostile, something called the Ghost Dance. Fear of and hate for Indians brought together the largest gathering of cavalry troops anywhere since the Civil War.

About 130 years ago today, Big Foot, a Miniconjou chief from the Cheyenne River Reservation, known as a peacemaker, was leading his band south to the Red Cloud Agency, when they were stopped by troops from the Seventh Cavalry, who, a couple decades before, had taken a beating with Custer at the Little Big Horn. On a cold morning--this morning, December 29--in a bloody action that ran on for two agonizing hours, 300 men, women, and children, the Lakota say, were massacred in the last fight of what historians call “The Great Sioux Wars.”

To my ears at least, the haunting harmonies of “The Coventry Carol” could just as easily rise from the frozen prairies all around Wounded Knee, as do the lyrics of that ancient medieval lament. Musically at least, the carol’s spectral choral line—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”--has nothing in common with the chorus of Lakota death songs sung that day on the plains.

But don’t be fooled. Despair speaks a universal language. The words of those Bethlehem women, “lully, lulay,” are, I'm told, an old English expression that long ago fell out of usage. Linguists say that chorus—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”—repeats the agonizing testimony of those distraught Bethlehem moms: “I saw, I saw; I saw, I saw.” Who among the survivors would not have chanted something similar?

The Massacre of the Innocents may be folklore; some would argue so.

But Wounded Knee most certainly is not, and the determined lament of the old language holds true just the same, on the killing fields out west of here. “Lulay, lully.” I saw. I saw.

Although none of us may have been there, don't be mistaken--all of us were. 

Sunday meds from Psalm 29 (1)

 “Ascribe to the Lord, mighty ones, 

ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.” vs. 1

Mighty, I’m guessing, is a word like wealthy, a word people give to others, never themselves. Few of us would consider ourselves the “mighty ones” specifically addressed in the first verse of this thundering psalm, in which David the King seems to be addressing some tenth-century elite council of the United Nations. But let’s eavesdrop.

Think football. The quarterback fakes a handoff to the tailback, then drops back, eyes ranging downfield. He pumps once, and the linebacker chasing him goes for the fake, allowing him a few extra seconds. The flanker is on a fly pattern, so the QB heaves the ball up with everything he’s got, and somewhere down the field his man runs under it, grabs it, holds on, shuns a tackler, and waltzes into the end zone. The crowd ignites.

Today, almost inevitably in pro football, the receiver will perform. He’ll slam dunk the football over the goalpost or high five the first dozen teammates who greet him. Most of the time what follows is some bizarre chicken-strut, a gangly prance, a knee-dipping, elbow-flapping sashay. You know what I mean.

If it’s the home team, the crowd goes nuts, not simply because they love the dance but because they too feel the juice of that big-time touchdown pass. They love the score just as much as the flanker. Fortunately, the cameras never pan the stands. I’m sure just as much ostentatious prancing goes on in the bleachers.

Give all of that to God. That’s what David is telling his fellow potentates. Take hold of all that bravado, all that bellicose swagger, and lay it where it belongs, at the throne of God. Dance in joy to him. Cavort blessedly. Prance your praise.

To me, far too often, prayer means supplication. Some of the most earnest prayers of my lifetime—I remember them—have been uttered when I’m begging Him for something I can’t get or maintain for myself: a cure for cancer, an end to war, a balm for grief, a shelter in the time of storm. We draw closest to God, it seems, when our own reservoirs are depleted, when we know we need showers of blessings.

It may well require more of us, however, to bring him our glory and our strength, to thank him for a great class, to bless his name for the end of a story or a novel that just wouldn’t come. For rain. For the music of the birds. For sweet Sunday mornings,for care-givers in baggy over-colored suits.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s vastly easier to give him our worst than it is our best.

Ascribe to the Lord all strength and glory—that’s what David tells his potentate pals. Give him your finest diplomatic coups and the very best of your battle strategies.. Beg his love in your distress, but give him the praise for your everything.

Shouldn’t come as news to those of us reared in the Presbyterian tradition, in which the very first question and answer says as much. David’s song is more bellicose; the catechism, perhaps rightly, is more restrained; but the idea is the same: What is the chief end of man? The answer is simple: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

Give him your shutouts Bless his name with your As. Give him your laughter, your smiles, your greatest achievements. They’re his anyway.

Glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Old Years sermon (continued from yesterday)

An AFO is a mechanism which sounds vaguely military and therefore more than a little scary. Trust me, it's not scary, but it's part of a nurse's language that has to be broken if you're going to get along with them. 

"What'd you do with your AFO?" Maggie says one morning. 

I had no idea what she was talking about, even though I'd been wearing two of them for months. 

Try this on for size. Two goals I had in Heartland Manor; one of them was to get out. The other was to get some good sound "occupational therapy." So you're something of a cripple now, I told myself--you can't use your legs without a walker. How do you pee? Takes a nurse. How do you change underwear? Takes a nurse. There are things you have to learn before you graduate into the real world where there are no nurses.

I thought I'd take a shortcut and learn some things on my own--like how to pee in a toilet instead of that blessed uranyl. So I deliberately avoided that little red button on the long stem, told myself I didn't need two fricken' nurses to help me relieve myself. I swung my dead legs out from the bed, harumphed myself up to my walker, stood, took one step, and crumpled like a cheap suit, at which point I hit the button for the nurses.

I didn't put a light on in the room, so there I lay on the floor in my underwear. 

"Where are you hurt, Jim?" the nurse says.

"Right there in my pride," I said, or something similar--I mean, there I lay, gird only in my Duluth skivvies, a 260-pound, 6'2" old bald man sprawled out on the tile floor like a really bad joke. 

"What's this?" one of them asked, pointing at a lake of dark liquid.

"Maybe I spilled some cranberry juice," I said innocently. Honestly, I had no clue it was blood, but then my feet had been numb for months. I had no feeling.

It wasn't long I was in an ambulance headed for Orange City because those nurses were sure I was going to require stiches to repair the rips beneath my toes. 

Nobody'd seen anything like it at Orange City Emergency, and a doc on call shook his head, just like the nurses, who took picture of this patient with slices of open meat beneath his toes--"amazing! I've never seen anything like this." 

I giggled, so they did too. For fifteen minutes, I was the show in Emergency.

But once they got me glued together, they sent me back on my merry way to the home, with the stern advice that I stay in a chair or bed for 72 hours. . .72 unmovable hours, seemed like half a lifetime. And it was. 

What I didn't realize was that I was also sentenced to an instrument of torture--if I needed to move, I'd  be hoovered (I don't know how to spell it), which means being harnessed up with four wide straps, then lifted (a hoover is motorized) freakishly to wherever you need to get to--a toilet, for instance.

It was, for me anyway, the height of humiliation to be hoisted up off the bed by a medieval machine pushed into my room to take control. There I was, bare-bottomed or Jockeyed, hauled off to the throne, where the hoover gently set my bottom down where I meant it to be when I took that damned, fatal step out of bed.

For 72 hours, it was just me and the hoover, "the stork," I called it--the nurses giggled--because it wasn't a wholly different method of transportation than that commonly attributed to storks delivering similarly undressed babies. "Get the stork," I'd say for 72 of the longest hours in my life.

Here's the deal. When my 72 hours was history--and not a second before--the OT, a darlingly hefty blonde who might have made a good line coach had football been her thing--told me that blessed hoover would enter my room no more the moment I could stand. "It's that simple--can you?" she said.

I never did feel any pain; my toes were far too numb, so I said something akin to "you bet your ass I can."

So the two of us turned into a team because she understood how tough it was for an old Dutch Calvinist professor of literature, but still a rookie at this whole hospital schtick, to be paraded around, strung up, arms and legs dangling like some stuck creature from who-knows-where.

"Let's get you up," she said, growling through a smile.

And I stood. I did. I got myself standing, and there I stood, hanging on to the walker. I stood on my own too bandaged feet. I stood straight up, locked my shaky knees for a minute, stood there before the OT, who, I swear, was just as thrilled as I was.

It would take me three weeks to graduate from rehab, three long weeks I could have avoided had I pushed the damn red button and called in the potty squad instead of  playing Lewis and Clark on my own in the middle of the night.

I can't tell you what a joy it was to stand there, even if it was for no more than twenty seconds. I stood, and in my mind, the image of me hung up in that blasted hoover was gone. Free at last. Thank God a'mighty, free at last.

It may seem a pittance to you, a silly little moment one afternoon in a rehab hospital, but I'm telling you, I announced the great tidings to every last nurse who dropped by that day and night, every last one. It was a holiday.  Pure joy.

On our way to an old-years service at our church that night, I told myself I had a sermon for old-years. Not only that, I deserved a place in line to tell my story. What kind of year was 2024 for the Schaaps.

If you must know, it was plain-and-simple, the shits. We lost half our house, I lost my legs, and Barb got handed a wheelchair with a cripple in it. Good riddance.

But then let me tell you about hoovers and AFOs, and the 72 hours at Heartland when I couldn't move without a hoover, and the pure joy the moment I stood up for the first time, let me tell you about a level of sheer thrill all through my broken body. 

There's more to the story, more to that sermon I planned all the way to church on Old Year's Eve. 

Don't know that it would have gone over, but I had something to say.