That Christmas. . .and today

Maybe I was ten, as I remember, old enough at least so my feet went all the way down to the pedals. It's hard to believe, but I don't think I even tried to ride the thing that Christmas Eve. It was a cold Wisconsin winter--aren't they all?--and riding it out of the living room on Christmas Eve would have been impossible--well, improbable anyway. Even though the bike never made it out of the living room that memorable night, in every other way that gift, that year became a highlight of my life. It was totally unexpected. My parents must have done a ton of thinking to figure out how to keep that bike out of my way in the house, to keep the present hidden. 

It was Christmas, which is to say, dead of winter  outside, so getting the new bike into the house and hidden away in the living room before the after-church opening-presents ritual took some doing. How do you hide a 26-inch J. C. Higgins in the living room? Stealthily, I'm sure. 

Somehow they got me out of the house when they brought that beauty in. I don't know whose idea it was, but  that Christmas Eve jumped forever to the very top of my never-to-be-forgotten holiday seasons: the Christmas I got my first real bike.

Went something like this. It was Christmas Eve, after the Sunday School program at church. We lived a block north, so I expect that I raced home, hoping my parents would do likewise. In all likelihood, they did. I don't know that they could start the drama fast enough. 

Opening presents is an engagement that requires ritual. What you don't want is bedlam--the once-a-year joy is too good to race through. It calls for deliberation. When my sisters and I got a little older, I'm sure we were handed the mantle to distribute the goods. Back then, I think Dad took care of it. Slowly.

What I hadn't noticed was that the entire vestibule had been emptied, all those coats and jackets spread evenly over the back of the couch. Honestly, I never noticed. What I do remember is a sense of being cheated, a sense I would never have admitted back then, but something as palpable as the carols Mom had playing on her Magnavox stereo to set mood. I wasn't getting my share.

I'm sure I didn't hear a thing. It was Christmas Eve, for pete's sake, the biggie. I'm sure we worked at it--one present at a time: first Judy, then Gail, then me catching the spotlight to see what emerged when the wrapping paper came off. And I've never forgotten the palpable sense that I was getting rooked somehow, that my bounty was solely in arears, that I wasn't getting my share until finally Dad told me to take those jackets and coats off the back of the living room couch.

That's when I knew I'd smacked the jackpot. Just like that, a shiny handlebar found its way through deliberate lie of the pile of coats. There was something beneath all those things--good night! it was a bike, a full size, 26-inch beauty, shiny-new, the most memorable Christmas present I'd ever received--and I had absolutely no idea it was coming.

That Christmas remains as one of the, if not the most memorable Christmases of my life.

All of that rides back from my memory from the late 1950s, when my parents must have determined that it was time their son had a good bike, his own bike, and went out like drunken spendthrifts and bought a brand new 26-inch J. C. Higgins for their son. It was a pure surprise, a shock so full of joy I can feel it yet. Whatever pictures I had are likely gone with the flood, but I know very well what the bike looked like when I pulled it from behind the living room couch, where it had been so stealthily hidden.

All of that comes back to me now because if the dealer has it right, I'll be getting a  huge box full of another bike, this one actually a trike. It's coming today, seventy years or so later--not a J. C. Higgins, but a specialty brand made just for seniors like me who've lost some balance. One can't relive one's history, and  I won't try; but pardon me if I don't, just  now, feel a bit of the kid in me. 

Today, I'm getting a new bike. . .well, trike, and I'm thrilled.

___________________________ 

The tank was red, like the one up top, but so was the rest of the bike. I haven't a clue what happened to it, but I'll never forget the Christmas it was right there in the living room with us. 

What I did on my summer vacation

 

Oops.

The guy must have thought that someone back home would get a big kick out of the picture, that it was, therefore, a suitable souvenir of the time he spent somewhere out fighting a war some place other than his Jewish home. If you listen close enough, you can just about hear him chuckling, or maybe his buddy, the guy with the camera, who grabbed this shot when his friend leaned in to make it look like sport.

He got what he wanted, I guess, a record of his stupidity, of his callousness toward a major world religion, more Catholic than Protestant, I imagine, but just as offensive toward any and all major world religions.  

I'm not entirely sure that this soldier's being Jewish matters all that much. What he's up to is an act--giving the virgin a cigarette--that's just plain vulgar, an act so decidedly so that is to almost anyone a sacrilege. Such things happen in war, I guess, even though both sides in any conflict would much rather not have a bunch of these kinds of photos lying around awaiting publication. You can bet that this guy and his buddy with the camera thought helping the Virgin light up was a scream.

I guess you had to have been there. 

The Middle East has been a tinder box forever really, and will likely continue to be, next week, next year, next century. 

Which is not a reason to stop working for peace. Try to imagine, if you will, seeing the Middle East as something other than a tinder box, a place for instant aggression, a place for holding on to resentment as if it were a blessing, not a curse.

Some guy thought it would be a scream to stick a butt in the mouth of the Virgin. Almost certainly, he got some encouragement. Such a riot! Sometimes war can be fun. 

Sometimes peace can require another world altogether.    

Small Wonders--the Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers like this one--the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.

As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later.

There will be visitors this summer, but no Disneyland crowds. It's too bad, really--it's a wonderful monument, full of moral implications--and not changing anytime soon. 

But not forgotten

 

In a work of fiction, it's almost impossible to make a character as supremely loveable as Nebraska's Willa Cather does with the great earth-mother Antonia, in her century-old novel My Antonia. This Antonia isn't one bit divine, but her zest for life, notable throughout a childhood Cather recreates, is perfectly enchanting. If you've read My Antonia and you love the novel, as gadzillions have and do, then you probably adore Antonia, or Tony, as Jim Burden calls her in the story.

Tony is not untouched by the dark side. She is the oldest daughter of an immigrant Bohemian family struggling to make a go of it on uncooperative Great Plains land, one family of thousands, many from all over Europe, who believed that this new country was their chance to escape the bondage of poverty. For some, that dream was real. For others, just staying alive required every last stich of strength and perseverance. Some didn't make it.

Tony's father, Anton Shimerda, was something of an aristocrat in the old country. But he'd married a tyrannical woman, then lost himself in the vast expanse of treeless prairie he found himself in here, bereft of the art and music that had enchanted his soul.

Tony's father ends his life by suicide. She was just a girl back then. His death not only emptied her life of her father's presence and grace, but forced her to take over the hard, hard work of breaking ground for a sustainable life.

Still, like Jim Burden, who cannot forget her, readers can't help but love Tony Shimerda, who eventually came to town to work for well-situated town folks. What she and the other hired girls take with them is rowdy earthiness of their country ways. Off-limits to town boys of means, the country girls just want to have fun. Jim Burden's parents, in sanctified righteousness, forbid him from going to dances, where the country girls just plain shine. They're thought to be loose. 

No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.

Quite suddenly, Tony finds herself with child, and on a train to Denver, where the father, Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor on the railroad, told her he'd meet her, marry her, and raise a family. 

In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.

She can do nothing but return. With her brother, she slaves through harvest season and into winter, when one night she locks herself in her bedroom and delivers her baby boy herself. 

You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. 

If you've never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, schedule a trip sometime soon. Because Willa Cather used so much of Red Cloud and its history, the town's heart and soul is their favorite novelist daughter. You can visit the little old Catholic church where Tony eventually married the farm boy who gave her the rest of her kids. You can visit their farmhouse, the Pavelka place, north of town.

Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.

And be sure to stop at the tiny cemetery plot at the beginning of the tour. You can't miss it--it's right there along the gravel. In it stands the stone of the man who abandoned Antonia Shimerda, in real life, Anna Pavelka. 

Of course, his name isn't Larry Donovan; for the record, what's etched there in stone is "James William Murray." There's the stone all right, just where the tour notes claim it is. And here's the thing: the bottom of the stone bears this old cemetery cliche: "Gone but not forgotten."

No kidding. "Gone, but not forgotten." Every year thousands of people take that gravel road tour, and nobody forgets what Larry Donovan did to your and my Antonia. Poor James William Murray: in Red Cloud, Nebraska, so much just can't be forgotten. 

Visit sometime. Stop there at the grave and tell him he was a cad. Or worse. Good night, was he ever. Like a hundred others, tell him he's gone all right, but not forgotten.

Ashley's Prudence

William Ashley

Prudence is no fun. It's girl scout stuff really. Making sure that things are done right, done thoughtfully, prudence clears the room of wild exuberance and joy. But then learning prudence almost always is worth it.

As it was for a man named William Ashley. History has almost totally forgotten him, but once upon a time in the colonization of North America, Ashley played a significant role. It was his idea to alter the course of human events by hiring 100 adventurers to become trappers through the land Jefferson had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Ashley put together one hundred men he thought he could trust and brought them up here into America's frontier.

William Ashley was a point man for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who'd done what most other traders had been doing to trade with Native bands. Pots and pans were a hot item, as were beads, as well as other commodities were similarly beloved--guns and liquor.

Ashley learned quickly that guns could pull a good price, but a year or so after unloading rifles on the Arikara, he also learned he had to exercise some prudence in trading. A year after watching those rifles pass into Native bands, those very same rifles most definitely came back to haunt him. Twenty of his husky mountain men were killed in a rightly famous fight that took place just upriver from Mobridge, South Dakota, the first big fight between white men and red men west of the Mississippi. 

Why?--a perfect storm of reasons. First, the Arikara had already been mistreated by the legions of white men streaming into what had been their neighborhood; second, the chief's own son came back dead from hunting with the enemy, the story of his death simply unconvincing; third, some of Ashley's men had flagrantly abused some of the Arikara women; and finally, the Rees attacked because they had rifles and ammo they got from none other than Ashley himself. 

Did he learn? Yes. In his journal, he wrote, "“Trade what you can afford to lose; never trade what can be turned against you.” That's prudence, "the ability  to govern or discipline oneself by reason." Not fun, but good, smart stuff like cod liver oil. 

The Arikara were up high on the banks of the river, in a perfect position to pick off the aliens, and they did, Ashley's men taking to the river, where some drowned while others took the current downstream until they dared take cover in the bushes lining the Missouri, sometimes weeks later, or so the story goes.

Sometime later, one of those survivors, a man named Hugh Glass got in a fight with a bear, got himself sliced up like a tomato but somehow lived to tell about it. Jim Bridger's map-like memory helped him find his way around country that had to have seemed as wide and eternal as anything anyone had ever seen. Jedidiah Smith offered up a public prayer some claim to have been uttered in the very first Christian service west of the Mississippi, which happened to be a funeral.

Sometime later--not long--the stories continued to pile up. How the west was won is a book with a multitude of chapters, big as the west itself, all of which add up, for better and for worse, to our story.

 “He will not let your foot slip—

he who watches over you will not slumber; 

indeed, he who watches over Israel 

will neither slumber nor sleep.”

 

About couple of decades ago, when my family and I were being shown around the old central city of Leiden, Holland, we were taken up on some kind of ancient battlement that has stood there for centuries. 

 

Hundreds of people were about, as they say.  Our guide, a historian, was narrating the story of the ancient city from atop the battlements, which, as I remember it, was a huge concrete angel food cake.  Dozens of people were strolling on it, enjoying the sun and the Sabbath. 

 

I couldn’t help thinking about the fall one might take if one lost his or her balance or was somehow nudged off the edge.  There were no fences, no wires, no plexi-glass, and no warning signs.  If you would fall, you’d simply splat on the ground beneath it, maybe eight or ten feet, as I remember.

           

“So I’m amazed,” I told our guide at Leiden, “that there’s no wall.  What happens if people fall?  I mean, someone could sue.”

 

He laughed. “The court would say, ‘You’re a fool for falling off the edge.’”

 

I found that answer really strange because it wouldn’t happen here, and certainly wouldn’t be said. In fact, it’s possible that someone might stage a fall just to reap the dividends. We are a litigious society.

 

I don’t need to go back farther than fifty years or so in my own ethnic tribe to locate theological arguments that questioned the righteousness of insurance.  I mean, what God appointed to happen, happens, or so the tenet runs. Insurance, theological purists argued, weakens dependency on God by pushing the insured to take comfort instead in a financial portfolio.

 

Today that argument is dead in the water.  It would be impossible to live without insurance these days, a high-wire act without safety nets.

 

But Psalm 121 minces no words.  In its eight short verses, it insists five times—count ‘em yourself—that God watches over us, and he does so without blinking.  He neither slumbers nor sleeps.  He’s always there.

 

Affluence is a buffer, keeping us from need.  From when comes my help? —from my 401Ks, my retirement fund, my nest egg.  It’s probably fair to say that in terms of heat, clothing, fuel, and food, in the west at least, we’re warmly taken care of.  That God watches over us is nice, but get real and keep your eyes on the Dow Jones.

 

All of which would be true, if it weren’t for the tortures of the soul, the pain that comes from wounds within.  Far be it from me—a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world—to say that those hurts, sorrows of the heart, are more crippling than the sorrows of the flesh.  I’m in no position to judge. We’ve got food in our new refrigerator.

 

But I know something about heartache, as does everyone who’s ever lived, including the only one of us who was sinless.

 

Fat or thin, rich or poor, what remains the greatest comfort is not a good lawyer or a bountiful insurance payoff. What Psalm 121 won’t allow us to forget is that our God is always there, vigilant, caring, protective.

 

The poet can’t say it often enough. He’s there, he’s there, he’s there—and he won’t fall asleep on the job. You can’t buy that kind of insurance. The sinless one already did.

Morning Thanks--spring green

It's a whisper you can miss if you pass too quickly. Suddenly there's a long patch of emerald along the road, as if someone had forgotten to pack it away. Early April it begins to show itself because it's not fiction. It'll come if you just give it time, and its first slight promises are a themselves a blessing. See it here in the short grasses? Won't be long and they'll be challenging last year's stiffened monsters. It's coming--spring I mean. That's a promise.

It'll be awhile before the long grasses atop Spirit Mound give up to the relentless growth of new spring grasses, but if you look closely you can't miss the story. Won't be long either--

--because have no doubt! spring is on the way. It's begun it's' relentless assault on all things old and gold and lifeless, and soon enough its annual revolution will be over. But right now, it's only just begun.

Today already, it's there, but you have to look closely. It will take awhile before all that green new life secures its reign, but it will. Soon enough the whole site will be emerald.

Have no doubt--it'll happen. Always does, mercifully. Suddenly, you turn around and there's new life for as far as you can see. 

But not quite yet. It's as if no one has let last year's grasses know that it'll just be a matter of time--

But it'll happen. Always does. This morning's thanks are for a marvelous event that can't be missed--the advent of spring, a bright and colorful remedy to winter's aching cold. 

Once more, it's a'comin'.

Things are looking up.