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.

It's my bat. It's got my name on it because when I was ten maybe, I branded it with a magic marker. No, I haven't packed it along with me for all these years. For a long time, it was the possession of one of the kids who played ball with us out there at First Reformed. Maybe thirty years ago, he gave it back when we stopped at his place in Hastings, Nebraska, and, yes, it was a great, surprise gift.

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.

In praise of a place we called home (7)

 

Once upon a  time, i could walk to the Dunlop pond--it's in the neighborhood, and I'll miss it.

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.   

In praise of a place we called home (6)

 We will miss winter too.

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. 

  

In praise of a place we called home (5)

 Some skies and a couple of birds as we leave.

When?

 

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  

When can I go and meet with God?”

 

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation that swept Native life throughout the American west in the final years of the 19^th century. 

 Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelation. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents.  Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness. 

 Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude.  Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges.  Dance into frenzy.  Dance into religious ecstasy.

 If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering.  When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.”  The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their beloved way of life.  If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people.  If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted. 

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.”  

It was that simple and that compelling a vision. 

 As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of a culture, created a religion that played a disturbing role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

 It’s not hard to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42 if we’ve never felt the thirst David is talking about. But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, spiritually and physically. 

That’s why the thirsty four-leggeds here would make sense to Native people—why, back then, they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song. 

 What’s at the bottom of this lament is nothing less than God’s apparent absence.