"It ain't my first rodeo"

For the record, these days I have no idea what my rear end looks like. At home, we've got at least one full-length mirror, but I don't know that I was ever vain or crazy enough to spin around and survey the scene. 

I was a high school jock. I've taken a thousand locker room showers with countless other wild-ass nakeds. It was impossible not to see loads of other posteriors, so I think I know what they look like--what I look like--with one exception: it's seventy years later. The lot of us, if left undraped would most certainly look. . .well, how should I say it?--forlorn, droopy maybe. 

But I've never looked in that full-length bedroom mirror, so I swear I don't know what kind of impression my own bare butt might make.

I know the bundle I carried was of considerable heft years ago, when I couldn't have won wind sprints if the other guys wore 20-pound weights on their ankles. I remember being a lousy hitter because I knew that if I swung hard I could slam a good pitch 500 feet in our fence-less ball diamond and, if I was lucky, end up on third. My butt was a burden, an embarrassment. It's true. 

But that was a thousand years ago. In college, I'll never forget being at a motel swimming pool with friends. Later, alone, this girl I was seeing told me that some of her friends told her I had cute buns.

Cute buns. That was sometime during the Paleozoic Era.

Right now, there's no chance of my checking out what's behind me. Besides, I'd rather not know.

All of which is a dirty shame because right now, living in a nursing home's rehab center as I do, I couldn't begin to count the number of women who have, already, pulled down my pants. Dozens of women of all shapes and sizes have come face-to-face with my keister. I've hosted whole gatherings in front of the toilet, but mostly it's just two or so tugging down the sweat pants one more time before I aim my butt at the throne. 

Morning comes. "Wanna change your briefs?" one says. 

Nod, and down they come, full Monty.  

Listen, it takes some moral, emotional, and spiritual adjustment for a 76-year-old Dutch Calvinist Professor of Literature to adjust to full frontal nudity before a bevy of CNAs. But they're sweet about it and quick too, which is nice. 

For my first bath--I hadn't taken a bath since the early years of this century and never, well, in public--a sweetheart named Mollie smiled when I let her know I wasn't yet at home being buck naked in her cold plastic bath chair. "Oh, get over it," she said. "This ain't my first rodeo."

I'll admit it--that helped. When I can't help but feel exposed, I tell my chilly soul, it ain't none of them's first rodeo. 

For Dutch-American Heritage Day

Whatever the cause, we  needed a sump pump--new house, too dang much rain, walk-out basement--we needed a sump pump. But where to buy one--'twas a Sunday as I remember, and there sure warn't no place I knew of to buy a sump pump on the Sabbath. 

"Go to Le Mars," the neighbor said.

"Bomgaars open there, you think?" I said. Orange City's sure enough wasn't.

"South of 10," he answered easy en0ugh.

I had to think that answer through. Hwy 10 runs through Sioux County, west to east, from the Big Sioux at Hawarden to Granville. When it does, it creates a line behind which--to the north--lies "Dutch Siouxland." "South of 10," roughly, abides a different world, the world whose inhabitants my people for  years, maybe a century, called "Americans."  

For the record, the Dutch came to Sioux County, Iowa, in or around 1870. At the same time--same year--another ethnic contingent, this one from Luxembourg, found their way to the last unsettled region of Iowa and parked their colony just a bit east and north of the wooden  shoes. The Dutch came from Pella mostly, the Luxembourgers from St. Donatus, where they left a tiny village that looks in places as if nothing's moved.

For the record, the sprawling lines of the railroad picked out a place and determined it to be a stop--water and wood for billowing engines. They created similar burgs out here for their convenience until homesteaders came along to call the place a town. That's how Marcus was born, a railroad town, no nirvana for ethnic types in wooden shoes, black dresses, and long prayers. 

There were no visions, no scriptural mandates, just cord wood and water for the boiler.

In Marcus, a depot went up, as well as the section man's shanty, together creating the very first sense of something standing here in a treeless prairie so broad you could ride all week long and not get out of it. The town's name wasn't particularly difficult for John Blair, the railroad king, head of the Iowa City to Sioux City Railroad,, whose son just happened to be named--well, Marcus. 

Orange City is named for a storied Dutch hero of mythic proportions. 

Mr. Blair had a thing about names. When Aurelia was incorporated (it was platted as early as 1883), the king of northwest Iowa railroads simply slapped down the name of one of his daughters.

Cherokee, Iowa, had only a bit less pragmatic birth. A half-dozen families from Massachusetts bought up land for purposes of trying life out west. If those original families shared a religious heritage, history doesn't mention it.

I've spent a month now "south of 10," in a convalescent home in Marcus, Iowa, cared for lovingly by a bevy of nurses, CNAs, and others who don't call Orange City home. They're a terrific bunch I'd commend to anyone, but many of them don't know the Dutch, except for this Tulip thing of theirs and the sheer awe they exhibit in the presence of high school volleyball giants.

They're the children of Americans, all of them, and daily they do my dirty work--they sweep my legs into bed and out, they  undress me, change my underwear, wipe my butt, and move me, when asked, from chair to toilet and back. 

They have tougher stories than I'm used to and a bunch more tattoos. They seem to have more dogs than marriages, although that might be disputed. Many work part-time, then double up at other old folks' homes. They're not rich. They're just plain dang good at what they do. 

Don't mention this north of 10, but I believe I've fallen in love with a dozen of 'em--"Americans."

Where to listen

 

She’d told me about the school she’d attended as a little girl, almost ninety years before. She spoke of the humiliation of losing, so quickly, her free-flowing long hair, felt the absurd foreignness of having to speak a language she didn’t understand. All of that in a big reservation school, the school at the agency, the school her parents insisted she attend. She held very few memories from that place that were a joy, but she remembered how her father would come to visit almost weekly.

She was a child there. She was being shaped into adulthood.

Years later, after nurses’ training in Rapid City, she’d returned to the Agency hospital, same town, the hospital where she worked on the same reservation where she was born and reared. First school, first job—home, in a way, even though she lived a half day’s ride away. She wanted to show me all of that, wanted me to see what I could of her childhood really, and, at the same time, history of her people.

Sometime previous I’d asked her to take me to her precious places, those places where significant things had happened in her life, the really important things. I wanted to see those places with her. It was a joy for her to remember and for me to watch and feel her explain.

First stop was a cemetery, where we hunted down her grandfather’s grave. She knew where it was but hadn’t stood there before. Then we drove on, all the way to a long crooked finger of land so high above the river it didn’t go under when the Army Corps of Engineer’s finished the Big Bend Dam, far down river. It was the far eastern bit of reservation just off Hwy 212. A little park just off the road is hardly elegant, but the great blue lake the river formed is gorgeous, so elegant against rough-hewn reservation boundaries that it looks like Disney.

“There,” she pointed straight into the water. “All of that life, so much of my history, our history is lost forever beneath the water.”

Who in South Dakota could stand against the dams 75 years ago when they were built? Who didn’t rejoice with the kid waterskiing directly over the old Agency on that perfect summer day? What on earth is not to like about Lewis and Clark Lake?

That moment returned to me last week when Wright Thompson says a similar thing in  his new book, The Barn: A Study of a Mississippi Murder. Floods explode down, into, and through the Mississippi Delta area, he says, and have for more than a century. Flooding has destroyed whole river towns. swallowed them up beneath rampaging water and mud that swamp alleyways and streets and bury businesses and churches. In some locales, Thompson says, locals swear “they can hear church bells ringing when the currents move right.”

It's a beautiful image, isn’t it?—the sense that when the currents are just right you can hear church bells from churches long buried in the deep?

I’d like to believe that because that reservation memory came back to me in a torrent when I read it in Thompson’s book, at least something of what my Native friend was trying to teach me got home. 

I know lots of empty places where I swear I can still hear distant church bells.

Sunday Evening Meds--from Psalm 4

“Let the light of your face shine upon us, Lord”

 Like all of us, Moses’s brother Aaron stumbled through a life far less than perfect. Because he conceded to the Israelite mob that demanded an idol to worship, Aaron was almost single-handedly responsible for his brother’s wrathful smashing of the God-inscribed stone tablets, not to mention God’s wrath on his own chosen people.  No one ever mentions Aaron in a roll call of the saints.

 Yet, Aaron’s words ring throughout millions of church fellowships around the world every week.  The Lord told Moses (see Numbers 6) to have Aaron bless the Israelites with words that you can still hear almost any place two or three are gathered to worship God: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

 If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times.  King David likely did too.

 And maybe that’s why the line itself has lost its visual character; simply said, I’ve heard it so often. Just for a moment, it’s helpful, I think, to create the picture this famous benediction offers. Penitents, millions of them through the ages, are on their knees (it’s almost impossible not to see them in some kind of supine position physically) and in some kind of darkness, waiting for a brightening glance of Godliness, just a glance.

 Now delete millions of those people from that image and picture just one penitent. Put yourself there, on your knees, eyes slightly arched but staring downward in helplessness, a nervous shakiness in hands and arms and legs in anticipation of a passing glance, and repeat: “Let the light of your face shine upon me, Lord.”

 I dare say that the only people who can effortlessly create that image of themselves are those who, for whatever horrifying reason, have spent time themselves in that position.  Those who, like me, have never suffered significant bouts of abandonment or grief or despair have trouble creating an image of so great a helplessness. After all, I might say, I’ve got fairly substantial bootstraps to prove my internal strength. What I’ve done, I’ve done on my own.

 It seems so medieval almost, doesn’t it?—the image behind the blessing; so, well, Islamic:  hoards of people, face to the floor, hoping for a fleeting glance from the King of Creation.  Good capitalists create their own fates, after all; we seal our own successes with the sheer tonnage of our personal industry.  We make our fate.

 But the line we repeat so often—and hear repeated as a blessing to us—offers a wholly different portrait.  There isn’t a dime’s worth of self-sufficiency in David’s abject request here: “Just a glance, Lord.”

Embedded in the old line is something of the sun, of course—God Almighty as iridescent force whose rays bless abundantly. And what David wants, as has each and every one of us who’ve been in that abjectly needy, is but a glance of divine favor, a glimpse of light in the darkness. We’re not even asking to meet God’s eyes; the line begs for something to take away those heavy shadows, just a glance.

 It’s so medieval, so lords and serfs, country manors fortified cathedrals. It’s so impotent, so paralyzed, so defenseless. It’s so blasted un-American.

 And yet I know—I really do—that such helplessness is what He wants. “The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

That Dreamy Little Cabin in the Woods

There's no accounting to taste. Just exactly why it is some people adore Terry Redlin's perfectly darling paintings is unfathomable to those art lovers who declare unequivocally that any mess by Jackson Pollack is (ahem!) real art.

It comes as  no surprise that one might find a Terry Redlin or two on the walls of Woodbridge Clinic, since among the residents it would be difficult to find an admirer of, say, Piet Mondrian: I'm guessing Terry Redlin lovers almost certainly abound. 

I can't quite make out the painter who did the image framed and hung on the wall outside the bath, but I noticed the painting when I was next in line for a dunking. Like almost anything by Terry Redlin, a powerfully comforting source of light drops a heavenly radiance over it all. Here, it's a cabin in the woods (you're surprised?) surrounded by a gorgeous forest, every last limb of the blessed pines encircling the place hung heavily with lovely lake snow. Comfy. Sweet. Nary a mosquito. 

For years my wife and I nurtured a dream of buying a cabin like the one that lights the whole scene so warmly. We thought (maybe I should say I) that maybe we could swap the bare naked prairie of northwest Iowa for some Minnesota hideaway beside still waters or lost among towering pines someplace breathing out warmth like this one. The image the picture offers is almost exactly the sweet image we (one of us especially) painted in our hearts. 

When the opportunity finally arrived, we backed out of our Terry Redlin dream. Family matters kept us in Siouxland, the emerald eastern edge of the plains. A painting like the one on the wall of the home, right there at the nursing home's bath, I reckon will never, ever be ours. 'Twill always be the dream it was, both of us far closer to 80 than we'd like to scribble down. 

Redlin's work is not great art, nor is this knock off; but it did get me thinking, which is something great art should at least begin to offer. I was  in line for the bath, waiting for the soapmeister to wheel me in for my turn in the suds. When I looked up at the painting, I wasn't thinking of Terry Redlin, wasn't even thinking of the perfect charm of the log cabin in windless, saintly pines all around.

I've been here at and in the home for coming up on three weeks. How long I'll stay is anyone's guess. There are things I have to learn, I'm told, things I have to master before I'm shoved out into the world behind a walker or throned in a wheelchair, things as elementary as how to put on shoes, or get up from a toilet--unbelievably difficult stuff when for the most part you've got no legs.

Amazingly, just about the moment I looked at that sweet little warmly-lit cabin, the I couldn't help believing I had no business dreaming of the place because I had no way of getting there. That heavenly cabin has no ramp. It's beaten snowy path is no place for a wheelchair. I couldn't cross the bridge. I couldn't even dream.

I've changed, I'd guess. I never would have thought of what I couldn't do. What I saw was that I could never even get there.

For the record, the bath was big and soapy and hot on my swollen, numb lower legs, just what I needed. . .just exactly what I needed.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 4

 

aftermath of flooding just off our land

“Many are asking, ‘Who can show us any good?’”

As we’ve said before, the very first word of the very first Psalm is the life’s wish of every last human being who has inhabited or is or still will inhabit this earth. What everyone wants—no exceptions here—is to be blessed. Like that man whose image graces Psalm 1, everyone—red and yellow, black and white; rich and poor; urban or rural cowboy; all genders; all creeds (and none); mass murderers and untrammeled saints—all of us want to be happy.

David’s characterization of the cry of “the many” here in verse 6 is thus perfectly understandable. He’s right. The questions we’re all asking are “Who can bring some joy into my life? Who can turn my mourning into dancing? How can I be blessed?”

Relative degrees of prosperity mean little, of course. Those of us who live in the affluent West often suffer more emotional woes than those whose lives, near and far, are at or below the poverty level. Which is not to say, of course, that the poor don’t plead the same question, which is, really, “who will help us?”

Even though the question David brings to our consideration is the question we all know well, just exactly how he means the comment seems to me to be up for grabs. Spurgeon can’t help but see in David’s characterization an implied criticism of the wicked; they’re rapaciously sinful appetites are constantly a-whoring, constantly chasing ill-fated images of happiness. But Spurgeon was a believer of his time, and his propensity for determining who is and who isn’t “the wicked” is legendary. To me, drawing the kinds of deep lines is a much tougher job than he found it to be.

I’m not sure that David is lambasting the wayward wicked with this line. What we’ve just come from in this very strange little psalm is a treatise sympathetically offered to those same sinners. “Here are the things you all should do,” David says, and then lays out his 12-step program. He’s concerned. He wants their blessedness.

Furthermore, at the end of verse six he uses the collective pronoun us; it seems to me that what David is saying about people is meant to be about us, not just, well, them. We all want somebody or something to show us good.

I may be wrong, but I’d like to read this verse as penitence, not preaching. That kind of reading at least brings some greater unity to the song. This odd little psalm began with a short but deeply felt request to God that the speaker heard (vs. 1). Then, it turns to sinners and howls (“how long. . .”), but that tone subsides into a warmly offered how-to, a description of the means by which those far, far away from God can draw closer.

In verse six—like verse one—David once again talks to the Lord, and I’d like to think he’s pointing at those who’ve listened to his little sermon. As he’s pointing, he’s asking God for the blessed warmth of His generous face on them, and on us, on all of us.

I guess I’d like to think that this isn’t a Psalm that shoves unbelievers into the fiery throes of hell, but puts in a good word for those folk, just as affected as we all are with wanting to be blessed.

Shine your love on us, Lord, he seems to me to be saying. We’re all lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.

Feeling Small

“Before my addiction, I used to love rock climbing,” so says, James Browning, one of the tough Appalachian guys Arlie Russell Hochschild interviews in Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and Rise of the Right. Hochschild’s concern is an ill-fated march by neo-Nazis, a prelude to the 2020 “Unite the Right” Charlottesville protest. What Hochschild wants to explain is the profound drift toward far-right politics the region has taken in the last few decades.

But this man Browning finds his way through the tribulation of joblessness and a besotted drug culture to moral redemption elsewhere. A rock-climber before his own addictions, he regains some balance high above the Appalachian Mountains. “Look out at these mountains on one of my first post recovery climbs, I felt part of life, “ or so says Mr. Browning. “I felt big. And I felt good.”

For four weeks now I’ve been institutionalized, a citizen of a land and a people unknown to me before. I’m in a nursing home, my third, because I’m crippled. I hope not to be thusly maimed in some distant future, but for right now I’ll say it again: I’m crippled. For some unknown reason, my legs don’t work. My quads, as the PT likes to say, have simply checked out, which means I’m largely subject to the loving hands of what seems a hundred nurses and CNAs, most all of which, let me say, I’ve discovered to be delightful. They dress me, take me to the bathroom, bathe me, pull up my drawers, and put me to bed.

They’re here, as am I, but they leave, end of shift. I don’t.

It would be vainglorious, in an odd sort of way, to think of myself as incarcerated, but I can’t help feeling that way some times, given the fact that in an earlier institution if I even stepped out of bed, alarms would shriek and the room would soon be thick with CNAs, most of them equally flustered and fascinated as the boss takes hold of my helplessness and returns all that doesn’t work on its own to the sheets.

If you’re asking yourself right now if it’s easy to get down about things, the answer is yes, of course. What I know about depression is camped far, far way at this point, but it’s not particularly difficult to feel the darkness. My wife is here daily; she leaves in early evening, so that the absolute worst part of my day is her going home. On the other hand, it’s a joy to send her off, knowing she’s going to the place I’d love being.

She called me last week, late morning, because she had news, “Big news,” she said, proudly, confidently. Honestly, I didn’t know how to react since she’s not one to overuse superlatives.

She couldn’t tell me about some miraculous healing—how could she know? I had no clue. “I give up,” I told her. “What is it?”

“You’re a great-Grandpa,” or so said a brand new great-Grandma.

I was alone, of course, in my cubicle. No one to grab. No one to hold. Maybe that was why—I don’t know, maybe that’s what explains the tears coming up like minor flooding. I found myself helpless to stop, even though, believe me, I tried. They just came. I didn’t ask--in fact I don’t know that before in my 76 years I’ve ever, ever bawled my eyes out for sheer joy.

I put the phone down and cried some more.

Neaveh Kay, eight darling pounds. Mom, Dad, and baby all well.

There wasn’t much to say. Maybe that’s why the tears.

So one of those CNAs dropped by just then and found me slobbering, still wiping my eyes. I told her the news without sparing superlatives and tried to apologize for the water works.. She told me not to be stupid. I had her crying too.

It’s probably idiotic for me to wonder why the waterfall? What was it in me that prompted emotion unlike any I’d ever felt before; but right there in the institution I kept seeing a lovely picture of fresh snow on a broad field. That fresh snow held footprints—my Mom and Dad’s out front, then mine and Barb’s, then, slightly smaller but no less distinct, Andrea’s and Piet’s—the brand new grandparents.

Finally, came two more, Joce and Lucas, the new mom and dad,

Then way at the end, two tiny little footprints. Right there in the snow lay five stories, that new one pinched and pigeon-toed, tagging along and holding its own.

Somewhere in Appalachia, I can’t help but hope that this James Browning, who beat the rap to which so many of his peers fell, is staying up there on the top of the Appalachian Mountains. “As time went on,” he remembers, “ and I felt more reattached to the world, when I reached the top, I felt something different. . I felt small,” he says, “and I felt good.”

That too, I can’t help but think—that too made me cry.

Sundday Morning Meds--from Psalm 4

“Many are asking, ‘Who can show us any good?’”

As we’ve said before, the very first word of the very first Psalm is the life’s wish of every last human being who has inhabited or is or still will inhabit this earth. What everyone wants—no exceptions here—is to be blessed. Like that man whose image graces Psalm 1, everyone—red and yellow, black and white; rich and poor; urban or rural cowboy; all genders; all creeds (and none); mass murderers and untrammeled saints—all of us want to be happy.

David’s characterization of the cry of “the many” here in verse 6 is thus perfectly understandable. He’s right. The questions we’re all asking are “Who can bring some joy into my life? Who can turn my mourning into dancing? How can I be blessed?”

Relative degrees of prosperity mean nothing, of course. Those of us who live in the affluent West often suffer more emotional woes than those whose lives are at or below the poverty level. Which is not to say, of course, that the poor don’t plead the same question, which is, really, “who will help us?”

Even though the question David brings to our consideration is the question we all know well, just exactly how he means the comment seems to me to be up for grabs. Spurgeon can’t help but see in David’s characterization an implied criticism of the wicked; they’re rapaciously sinful appetites are constantly a-whoring, constantly chasing ill-fated images of happiness. But Spurgeon was a believer of his time, and his propensity for determining who is and who isn’t “the wicked” is legendary. To me, drawing those kinds of deep lines is a tougher job than, apparently, he found it to be.

I’m not sure that David is lambasting the wayward wicked with this line. What we’ve just come from in this very strange little psalm is a treatise sympathetically offered to those same sinners. “Here are the things you all should do,” David says, and then lays out his 12-step program. He’s concerned. He wants their blessedness.

Furthermore, at the end of verse six he uses the collective pronoun us; it seems to me that what David is saying about people is meant to be about us, not just, well, them. We all want somebody or something to show us good.

I may be wrong, but I’d like to read this verse as penitence, not preaching. That kind of reading at least brings some greater unity to the song. This odd little psalm began with a short but deeply felt request to God to be heard (vs. 1). Then, it turns to sinners and howls (“how long. . .”), but that tone subsides into a warmly offered how-to, a description of the means by which those far, far away from God can draw closer.

In verse six—like verse one—David once again talks to the Lord, and I’d like to think he’s pointing at those who’ve listened to his little sermon. As he’s pointing, he’s asking God for the blessed warmth of his face on them, and on us, on all of us.

I guess I’d like to think that this isn’t a Psalm that shoves unbelievers into the fiery throes of hell, but puts in a good word for those folk, just as affected as we all are with wanting to be blessed.

Shine your love on us, Lord, he seems to me to be saying. We’re all lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.