Prayer for the Dead (a story for Christmas) -- i

 

I remembered yesterday that I'd once written a short story about a woman who'd got herself tossed out of a family by her missionary parents, a story about her life one Christmas when she found herself almost mysteriously led back towards parents she'd come to hating (it's a long story). I've been flirting seriously with one last book of short stories, stories whose origins are stories in themselves, like this one. 

One night at Rehoboth, New Mexico, I listened to a son of long-ago missionaries tell me of his anger at his parents for what they'd done to him (again, a long story). We were staying up late because we were on guard duty--it was a youth retreat and both of us were youth group leaders from Phoenix, Arizona, who'd come with our church kids to the reservation.

It was an unforgettable night for me because he told me things I really wouldn't have understood without him. He said it took him many years to come to terms and make peace with his parents. His sister--I asked him about her--she still hadn't, he told me.

So the historical background of the story includes missionaries on the Native reservations. In my short story, both parents have passed away, but their daughter--like my friend's sister--was holding out. Bea is that rebel, the one far away from the fold. She's refinishing an old oak table, the one her parents kept in their dining room for just about all of their married lives. Her daughter wanted to keep it--well, discover for yourselves in "Prayer for the Dead." 

The story will run 'till Christmas.

______________________________

Every Christmas her father used to say that when Jesus would come to earth again he'd feel at home on the reservation because the desert would remind him of the Holy Land. Then Dad would close the Bible, having read Luke 2 once more. "Bethlehem probably looks just like Split Rock," he'd say, the town where Beatrice Van Kley spent sixteen years, every school year of her life, and a place she never considered holy at all.

She opened the side door so the fumes from the stripper would escape the garage to the cold darkness. Just above the fence between the lots, reflections from Christmas lights at most every home down the block glanced off the shiny tops of two cars parked next door.

She tugged the exercise bike off to the side, in front of the washer and dryer, and laid newspapers down over the floor where she'd planned to do the work. She'd spent an hour before supper redoing a seam on Myron's Santa suit, where somehow last year, his elbows up, he'd jerked out the stitches again, creating a wide gap that yawned open to his T-shirt the minute he crossed his arms. "You can't wear it this way," she'd told him. "You're silly enough doing this every year, but I won't have you leaving here all torn up--even if that's the way you come back."

"As if anyone cares," he'd told her. "They're not checking my seams, Tootie. This is Christmas Eve."

"Just the same," she'd said, "take it off and let me fix it. I don't want my husband looking like something from St. Vincent De Paul."

Eight stops he'd make this year. At each of his employees' houses he'd drop in, not unexpectedly, with a bonus turkey and a little stray cash, a Christmas cowboy in a thick white beard. The life of the party. Always. And every place he'd go, he'd have a drink. Or two.

"And don’t come home sloppy,” she’d tell him. “You’re the only Santa Claus I know that's likely to fall into a fireplace without going down a chimney."

"Where's your holiday spirit?" he'd said.

"You're my holiday spirit," she told him, taking his last kiss on the lips before he left.

Her son Frank lived in Denver--her son by Shorty Toledo, the Hopi she'd never married. Frank showed up once or twice a year if he needed money, or phoned when he got in trouble. Otherwise, she never saw him. The first time he'd stood before a juvenile judge, a man whose mustache swirled down almost to a goatee, he'd been given a slap on the wrist for breaking into vacant houses. She'd wondered whether his getting off easily was really best for a kid who had only ever been a problem. She couldn't help thinking there was a kind of paren­tal justice going on with Frank. 

She'd married Myron Burnett, part Apache but not much Indian, five years later, in 1951, at a JP just across the Nevada border, and not at all on a whim.

She rolled the table over to the newspapers from the spot where daughter Char had left it. "We'll pay you, Mom--that's not it. We're not looking for a gift," Charlotte had said. "It's just that you do such a nice job."

She wasn't so foolish as to miss the irony: Beatrice Van Kley lifting linoleum off her parents' table, stripping it down, then anointing it with a new stain sharp enough to bring life back to grain no one had ever seen. Char had picked it up from her uncle Peter when he came back from the reservation pulling a trailer full of things he said were worth more to him than what he could get at auction. Her brother had buried their father in the cemetery Dad, Reverend Van, always considered half-pagan, decorated as it was with food offerings honoring the dead, sandwiches left open in Saran Wrap, paper cups half full of Coke, toys, soccer balls.

Char said she wanted the table. She had begun to care about things like that, about missionary grandparents she'd never really known and a story Bea thought much better left to un­written history.

Years ago, her mother had covered her kitchen table with a heavy layer of linoleum that protected the new surface from wear. Both parents were dead and gone; they'd never appreciate the beauty they'd hidden away. Typical, she thought. Her mother was likely saving the finish for the second coming.

She pulled the edge of the linoleum high enough to slide a putty-knife underneath. Getting the linoleum off would be the worst job. It would tear off in shards and what she couldn't rip she'd have to inch off slowly. When the phone rang, she waded through gutter spouts Myron left around the garage and took the receiver from the wall.

______________________

Tomorrow: A phone call from her daughter leads into a further exploration of Bea's fractured parental relationships and her life these days.

Brooding Upon the Waters

Before you get all priggish and tell me that I've got no business reviewing a book by a Dordt prof named Schaap, let me explain. It's not mine. Friend and former colleague in arms, Howard Schaap (no relation) has published (it's taken some painful time) his father/son story, not as fiction but memoir--including names and dates and places. He's titled it Brooding Upon the Waters, maybe a bit pretentious, but just about perfectly fitting for what's inside the covers, a life lived in the shadow of his father's bi-polar world. Brooding is a beautiful book, but it's not at all pretty.

It's beauty arises from its almost perfectly arranged weave of significant tropes; first, the trials of father Milt's mental/emotional illness, which serves as the  major track of the novel--Milt's manic ups and downs. Second, Howard's own highly developed sense of place (it's set here in Siouxland, in southwest Minnesota) and the identity this particular landscape bestows on those who live  here, whether they like it or not. Amazingly but convincingly, Laura Ingalls Wilder has a kind of starring role, although it's more accurate to say her father does. As charming and wonderful as the rest of the family were, the old man is and was a stinker the TV show chose not to feature. 

A third strand is drawn from Milt's Dutch Reformed pedigree, his faith, no matter what he thought of it or where it took him, and its practice. Fascinatingly, Howard traces his own Schaap genes back to the very heart of the afscheiden, the breakaway naysayer churches around Ulrum, the Netherlands took almost 200 years ago, a break engineered and celebrated by the loyal followers of what became, to many, a sect. That separatist undertaken created a legacy then shaped by the American experience of life on the unyielding land around the Leota, Minnesota. Milt is himself a victim of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, when things went under for him, making him feel himself to be a loser.

There's  more, I'm sure, but these are most of the majors with the exception of fishing, which becomes, in his son's retelling, the saving grace of his childhood and his father. Let me just say I've always been a fisherman wannabe, never really did much serious fishing, so all the technicalities Howard musters sort of miss me. What doesn't miss me, however, is the joy (and relief) that fishing brings to father and son. I don't think  you have to love fishing to love the book because Howard the Writer handles those scenes with such attention that the attention itself is convincing and compelling. Oh, yes, there's the totemic walleye glory that attends every day in the boat or on shore. Father and son are ever vigilant about the lord of the lakes, the walleye. They don't bite easily, but when they're landed, they're sacramental.

Most of the memoire features Milt's prolonged and painful stay at Mayo where the hospitals' legendary staff try their best to deal with a tough, tough patient and never quite do. That stay is a unifier, but it has its own powerful drama.

Every once in a while, you have to remind yourself that this is a memoire and not a novel because the story is told in such a seemingly imagined fashion. Milt Schaap is (or was) a real human being. His daughters are Howard's sisters; his wife is Howard's mom. There are moments in the story when you can only imagine being a fly on the wall listening his sisters reactions to what he's committed to the pages of this story. 

It's a really wonder-filled read that you want to--and some readers will--put down in places, not because it's boring (Howard's abilities as a writer are ever-evident), but because you just don't want to read what's almost inevitably coming.

Howard Schaap's Brooding Upon the Waters is really, really something. You won't put it down, even though you'll want to. Like I say, it's perfectly beautiful, but not at all pretty.

Morning Thanks -- Watchman deployment

The procedure was performed in conscious sedation with Dr. Rajpurohit, [a man I don't remember at all, may not even have been a male], performing periprocedural TEE [having something pushed down your throat isn't pleasant figuratively or physically, but I'm not complaining]. Right femoral vein access was obtained without difficulty using ultrasound guidance and initially a 6-French sheath. Perclose device was pre-deployed for closure after the procedure. ["No difficultly" was true, I guess, but I was potted--what did I know?]

Then, using J-wire, a 16-French sheath was inserted without difficulty. Through this sheath using double curved Watchman sheath and Baylis wire, transeptal puncture [puncture?--sheesh] was performed in good position for Watchman implantation*.

If you haven't already guessed what's up here, this is an in-depth summary I took from my patient's page of what I did on Monday, when my wife drove me off the the Sanford Heart Center (Sioux Falls) for a procedure that should, if it works, allow me to forget all the blood thinners I've been taking for years. The Watchman devise--you may have seen the TV ads--works like a trap to catch any stray blood clots before they steal their way into other areas of the body--the brain, for instance, and cause real harm.

The LX Pro31-mm Watchman F is what's new to my body, as of Monday morning. One of these Watchmen is now, hopefully, I guess, implanted in the very heart of my heart. Sounds scary, but I don't think it was, at least the team who inserted those sheaths didn't act as if it was--lots of chuckles. But, back to the news.

The sheath was moved into mid left atrium. Wire and dilator were removed and through the sheath, pigtail catheter was placed in left atrial appendage. Angiography of left atrial appendage was performed [seriously>--who knew?). Next, the sheath was moved into left atrial appendage and through it and the pigtail was removed. Through this sheath, 31-mm Watchman FLX Pro device* was deployed [like the National Guard?] in good position across the left atrial appendage with T showing no color flow around its edges and compression ratio of 25% with no pericardial effusion post deployment.

It's good to know--"no pericardial effusion."

Having had the procedure--sounds much worse than it was--I stayed in a hospital bed for four hours--not fun, by the way--but I'm not complaining, then sent home. 

So, should you wonder, I was at Sanford Heart Hospital all day long, and the worse part was getting there--really thick fog. 

Twenty-some years ago, I started this blog as a thanksgiving journal. I'm returning today with deep thanks for the crew who gave me a Watchman FLX Pro, found a place for it in my heart, swept in and swept out without a problem. 

Just thought I'd mention it. With thanks.

'Possums"

Whether or not they were the first Americans no one will ever know. What we do know is that the word “opossum” originates early in American history, a gift from Algonquin people, with whom it existed in a slightly different spelling and meant, essentially, "white beast."  Captain John Smith recorded it already in 1608. 

But calling an opossum a "beast" is a stretch. A grizzly is beast for sure. A buffalo? --of course. But possums are a footnote beneath a page of American beasts. They're fat little guys to start with, so shy they'll go stiff, freeze so tight they take on a particular scent and go dead-rigid--involuntarily too. They're the only American mammal that can be scared silly. 

Assessing beauty is, of course, impossible, but that doesn't mean we can't rig a scale. To me, a mink is a far sight more beautiful than a muskrat, and a mule makes a quarter horse look like an angel. An opossum?--you can't help but wonder exactly what the Creator of heaven and earth was thinking.

Years ago, when I was sitting at a kitchen table trying to painstakingly grade papers, one of the brothers or sisters came up on our deck and sat on our picnic table bench in the middle of a dark night, just sat there and looked at me. 

Of course, I wasn't scared--it was only an opossum. But horrified?--sure. Ugly?--no kidding, nose like a pig and a tail like a fat snake. Let's be blunt: Since 1608, as far as I know no possum ever won a beauty contest, much less tried. They're homely, downright homely. Try to find one at your local pet store.

Years ago, a neighbor couple across the alley decided to take down an old garage. When they did, they chased a few baby opossums out of a nest they hadn't known was there. It just so happens that some neighborhood kids, including ours, were close by when that old farm couple simply up and killed those kits, whacked them with a shovel.

I understand how, on the farm, amidst the animals, life and death is pretty much an everyday thing. I get that. Anyone whose lived on a farm has likely murdered something or other alive--too many feral cats, too many runt piglets for available spigots. Those old folks who whacked baby possums in front of my kids thought nothing of crunching their little skulls, one by one, and tossing death into the garbage. Today, forty years later, my kids still remember just about everything about that morning.

Maybe, like so much else, opossums have to die before we care. On the very first night I was legal to drive my dad's '64 Chev, I hit one--they're not quick--on a country road west of town. It was prom night, my first prom, and most of the rest of the night all I could think about was having killed that lousy opossum. 

Last year on a hike along the Floyd River, a kid came up the path toward me as if I wasn't the enemy. I walked right up to my boot, smelled it, then kept on walking as if I were of little consequence. He/she was small and likely freezing in midwinter, but I didn't offer him a place in front of our fireplace.

Standing beside me right now in our new place is a few canvas prints I had made, waiting to take a place on our wall. One of them is a close-up portrait of that little kid opossum who, on the banks of the Floyd, came right up as if I was just another cottonwood. 

Cute little thing really. That's him up top of the page.

For months that little guy--he's called a "joey," like his Aussie relatives--stayed in his mom's pouch. They're North America's only real marsupial, you know.

Oh, and I forgot: you got to hand it to 'em. . .opossums love ticks and eat more than their share. Isn't that wonderful? 

All that bad stuff I said?--let me just reconsider a bit.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 32

“Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”

 I read an interview some time ago with Susan Cheever, a novelist and non-fiction writer, who is—perhaps to her own dismay—likely better known as the daughter of the now deceased John Cheever, a highly celebrated short story writer.  For several reasons, that interview won’t leave me alone, and one of them is her claim that, to her as a child, her father’s short stories horrified her. 

 She remembers a time when her father used a ski trip she had taken as a base for a story about a little girl who dies on exactly that kind of outing. “In my family,” for her and her family, Susan Cheever says, “being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful” than finding themselves in portrayed in non-fiction, a memoir.

That line in that interview nearly decked me because it had never dawned on me that my family might experience a similar horror, victims, in a way, of their father’s imaginative “use” of their lives. I’d never, ever considered the grotesque puzzle I might have left with any of them, finding semblances of themselves and each other twisted and turned into something at once bitterly unrecognizable and sweetly familiar.  I can’t speak for John Cheever, but I honestly never had a clue—I really didn’t.

 Haunting questions arise unbidden.  Was my own playful creativity the occasion for their pain?  Was my joy their misery?  Should I have spent so much of my adult life trying to write stories?  Was the way I’ve lived my life dead wrong? 

 And I ask myself this:  if I had read what Susan Cheever says when I was thirty, would I have dedicated so much of my time and enthusiasm to writing?

 Perhaps it is a mark of the deep stain of sin itself, but now, looking back, I honestly can’t imagine myself not writing. For better or for worse, I guess, sitting here at this desk has become, for me, a “habit of being,” as Flannery O’Connor said. Sometimes, as the Bible says, our best deeds are as filthy rags.

I feel myself in David’s own shoes here in verse six: “Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”  His impulse to tell the story is, I believe, the impulse of most writers—and, for that matter, most humans. We want and need to tell the stories we find most meaningful, to share our joy or sadness. We want everyone to hear. Not all of us are evangelists, but we all have a gospel. We all want to testify.          

Psalm 32 is a roadmap for those who need to find a path to forgiveness.  Psalm 32 shows us the way.  Psalm 32 leads us to divine waters. But the story David tells has never saved a soul, and neither will a million sermons on this text, or, for that matter, this mediation.  Only God’s grace—through his son’s gigantic sacrifice—can do that.

I wonder if David knew that he was writing “the Bible.”  I wonder if he understood as he strung these words out in front of him that he was being directed by the Holy Spirit’s favor. I wonder if he ever considered his words were not his, but God’s.

 Somehow, I doubt it.  And because I do, I find a refuge in his inability to keep silence.  He’s got to speak, to sing.  With the joy of forgiveness bubbling up inside, he can’t stanch the music from his soul.  He’s got to yap, to tell.

Even his joy, his testimony, his story requires forgiveness.  Everything he is—even his ecstasy—stands in need of grace. 

May God almighty forgive me, and him, and all of us, as he promises, as he does, and as he will.    

A couple of decades ago

 

What was I learning, twenty years ago? I haven't really noted it plainly or definitively, but I'm coming to understand that photographs taken in a certain slant of sun are blessed with a Midas touch. When dawn burnishes everything, it makes anything and everything lovely. Look, this picture wouldn't be worth a thing if it weren't for the golden touch of an early morning sun on a blanket of fresh snow. Is this a beautiful shot? There's no accounting for taste, so my answer may suit me but no one else. 

But twenty years ago, after a blizzard, I went out to on an abandoned farm just a couple miles north of Lebanon, getting there early enough (these were shot December 15, 2005) to grab a bit of that gilded look that, in this place especially--an abandoned place--gives old junk a richness that's almost angelic. 

That's what I was learning twenty years ago after a morning outing with my precious camera and enough of a blizzard to bestow quilts all around.

Have a look. 

Are any of these pictures spectacular? Nope, but all of them are comely, made so by the gracious reach of an early morning sun. 

This week, a chunk of land some place close to Orange City brought (take a breath) 30K an acre. You read that right--$30,000. Made headlines around the state. 

I bring that up because these shots are hard to find these days; the land is so expensive that abandoned farms are all but gone.

That's sad if you fool around with a camera. 

Here's the most interesting shot I took that morning long ago. Takes a while to "read" it, but it's my favorite at least, mostly because it's fun.  

p.s. I don't think these files have ever been out of my hard drive before. It's kind of fun giving them an audience they've never had.

The Great Evangelical President

He may be right. He's lied so often that it's hard to trust anything he's saying. But let's just say he's right about the way he and his Secretary of War are running operations in Central America, picking off boats along the shore like fish in a barrel. Let's just say that each of these blasted boats were loaded to the gills with drugs. Let's just say that their pay for their grunt work in the drug trade is being picked up by someone or another in these United States. . . let's just say it's all true and Hegseth isn't the creep he presents himself to be. Let's just call them all saints.

I don't care. There's still every reason to believe that Donald E. Trump has been the most heinous American President in the whole line of succession. We've never, ever had someone in the Oval Office who's even hinted at outright hate the way the Orange man has and does. Yesterday, it was the Somalians, especially those from Minnesota: “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” 

We've never had a Chief of State who called an entire ethnic group of people "garbage." But as long as he'd delivered that madness, he figured, well, katy, bar the door. He went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali American congresswoman, duly elected, a “fraud” who “shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.”

All of this just yesterday from evangelical Christianity's President, a jerk who called the mayor of Minneapolis "a fool" for being proud of the state's considerable Somali population. 

Great guy. 

Oh, yeah--and on another track, Trump decided, for reasons all his own, to pardon the former President of Honduras, who was in prison here having been convicted of running drugs--cocaine--from his own oval office. Convicted. Tried and convicted--and Trump frees him when he spends a quarter-million every time he blows up a boat in the Caribbean for doing--if we believe our President--what former President Juan Orlando Hernández was not just accused, but convicted of doing out of his own back door. 

Does that make any sense?

And then there's this--a note from JoAnne Van Engen, who's lived in Honduras for the last 25 years of her life, and, with the ASJ makes it a habit to run in the face of political corruption. 

Trusted poling showed Honduras's Liberal party with a ten-point lead over the National party candidate, with the government candidate a distant third. 

Here's part of her report on that nation's Presidential election, held a week or so ago:

That lead was erased when President Trump tweeted his support of Asfura last Wednesday, warning Hondurans that the US would withdraw all support if Asfura did not win. Many worried Hondurans decided to switch their vote to Asfura. Twenty-four hours later, President Trump tweeted that he would pardon Honduras’ ex-president, Juan Orlando Hernandez who had been convicted of drug trafficking in the US and was serving a long sentence in a US federal prison. (Juan Orlando was released from prison today).

Aside from the kind of meddling that has created "the ugly American," Trump pardons a convicted, crooked pol who dealt in cocaine smuggling in a fashion that makes those little boats look like a computer game. 

Does that make any sense? Only in Trump's orbit, which is--thank goodness--growing smaller every week.