Remembrance

I'd seen her over there on the opposite side of the gym, a cheerleader, pretty as a picture, tall, even statuesque, leading her side of the gym against ours, mine. I think there may have been something of a giant-killer in me--I'd like to date her because she led cheers for our rotten rivals. Besides, she had great legs.

The kid that put me up to asking her out was a lineman from our football team, who'd already gone over to the dark side to date another young lady from the Cedar Grove Rockets, a young lady who'd conspired with him to get me to call her cousin, Gail, who would be--or so I was assured--most certainly assent to the big question, if I'd have the guts to ask.

One night, I called from a phone booth downtown with the lineman, my teammate, riding me like some wallflower. "Do it now, Schaap--call her. She thinks you're going to--call her! Call her now!"

It was one of those situational things--her people had been talking to my people to get the arrangements down, as if the whole thing was fearful political diplomacy. I was assured--and I believed it--that should I actually call her, she would most certainly say yes. 

Which didn't mean there wasn't any drama. As I remember, we stood outside that phone booth forever, him pushing me. I was scared to death. To me, she seemed a class act, no floozy, and I'd never, ever talked to her. Her dad owned a downtown grocery store. This was serious dating. I was a junior in high school.

Bob the offensive guard wouldn't let me out of the phone booth. It was a riot really, but that didn't mean that I wasn't shaking when I finally dialed in the number he gave me, even though the outcome was never in doubt.

She said yes, and the two of us were a thing for the rest of our high school years, despite our dueling allegiances-: twice-a-week dates, Friday night after the ball games, Sunday night after church. Tight as a class ring.

She determined it was in our own best interests not to go to the same college, so we didn't. I don't remember fighting about her declaration, but I bought in, so we went to school 500 miles from each other. 

I wonder, sometimes, how long she held on to the letters we wrote to each other because they went out almost daily from my dorm room. Today, I'd love to see what I wrote, not because I want to track the health of what was by then a true long-distance relationship. I'd love to read them because my first year at college was a garden of significant moments in my life. 

Our relationship, by that time almost three years old, didn't weather the distance. Mostly, the breakup was her fault. She conceded that she had started to chase some guy from her school once springtime warmed things. I'd stayed relatively true. When summer came, it was awkward and often distressing, but we stayed out of each other's hair.

The lights hadn't totally gone out, however, and in a manner I don't remember exactly we started to stumble into each other's arms again later in that summer, enough so that when our junior years began, we were tacitly a thing again.

The whole relationship had become, almost without our noticing it, far more serious, even if less dramatic--engagement, marriage. Nothing solid, but fairly serious discussion.

Then, one night, I was the one unfaithful. I told her what I'd done. Some friends said I was crazy for being truthful, but I was, maybe because I wasn't altogether sure of going where we'd begun to aim ourselves--I don't know.

That was it. The relationship ended on a river bank with a discussion that darkened fast. I brought her back to her apartment that night, and I never, ever saw her again. We'd spent the better part of four years together, four years that ended with my confession. I shed no tears, but neither did I understand myself or my behavior. I called someone, I remember, and asked about seeing someone at Pine Rest. Never did.

Yesterday, Super Bowl Sunday, an old friend called to tell me his sister, who has become a good friend of the cheerleader's sister, that the girl I used to love looking at across the gym was gone. She died last week, had Alzheimer's, I knew by way of the same pipeline. 

The image of my old girlfriend lying somewhere--I didn't know where--in some institutional bed, eyes open but speechless, her family visiting even when they knew nothing was registering in their mom or grandma--that image was almost paralyzing. I even wrote a story about it, just to be able to put it away.

Last week, she died. I don't know where. I have no idea how many people were mourning her death. Did she have children? I don't know. 

So much of her life is so far out of my reach that it just seems wrong not to remember. I had good friends in high school, but once upon a time none of them knew me better than she did. I'm sorry she died. I'm sad for those who grieve.

My wife and I have been married for 54 years. I never once dreamed about the woman who died last week--not once; but is it wrong for me to tell this story or to feel that something of me died with her? 

I wish her children--if she had some--and her husband--should he be yet alive--to be blessed with grace and peace as they walk through the scrapbooks they will share together, blessedly, throughout this week. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “I will counsel you and watch over you”

Procreation may well be humanity’s major interest in any relationship between the sexes, the perpetuation of the species; but marriage has other great benefits, to say the least.  One of them is lessons in how we see.  

I’m not interested in some gender war, but I’ve found—through fifty-some years of marriage—that my wife and I perceive things in different ways.  Let me say it more bluntly:  often as not, my wife and I see different things in different ways.

Years ago, she told me she didn’t trust one of my acquaintances.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  “His eyes,” she said, as if the answer were thus apparent.  

No clue.  “What about his eyes?” I asked her.  

“Just look at them,” she said.

Didn’t help.  I still didn’t get it.  The guy remained a friend, but not quite as close, not because I’d saw clearly what she had but because of what she had, and I trusted her.  

It struck me then—as it has since—that men and women perceive things in different ways. I’m no anthropologist, but here’s the way I came to understand the differences.  A woman’s perceptions have been sharpened by the necessity of centuries of defensive maneuvering they have to do, living, as they do, among predatory males.  

I know, I sound like an evolutionist. But consider this. My wife and I are not, nor were we ever, in the same weight class. I’m not a violent man (ask her), but for all of our lives together my wife has had to eat, drink, and sleep with someone so wide of girth that he could, should some madness attack, break a significant number of bones in her body.  

That’s never been true of me. I’ve never lived with someone who could so easily hurt me, but what I’m saying is that most women do.  That her perceptual strengths differ from mine—and that she’s inherited perceptions in her DNA that aren’t my own—seems to me quite obvious.  All I’m saying is this: we don’t always see the same things, and part of the reason for that is that “male and female created he them.”

The God of the Bible is beyond gender.  Our assessment of the Trinity includes the designation “Father,” of course, and the Bible speaks of him as a male most often.  As the creator and sustainer of the universe, he—make that God—has never really had to think defensively.  Maybe his perceptions are closer to mine, not my wife’s. I’ll never know that, of course, and I’m not about to lose any sleep because I don’t.

The NIV translates the second half of verse 8 of Psalm 32 this way: “I will counsel you and watch over you.”  That’s just fine with me.  But I prefer the King James’s “I will guide thee with mine eye,” a divine eye hovering somewhere around, all. the. time.  

Reminds me of that eye in Poe’s famous short story, “The Tell-tale Heart,” the eye that wouldn’t let the murderer alone. It also brings to mind the invisible eyeball in Emerson’s “Nature,” that odd image Waldo creates to document his vision as he was crossing what he calls “a bare common.”  

“I will guide thee with mine eye.”  There’s something memorable about that image.

“Male and female created he them.”  God’s perceptions, I’m sure, include both of ours—mine and hers.  And if that’s true—and I’m sure it is—then I have no reason to fear, no reason not to sleep in his care and love.  

Poe in the Loess Hills

Here's a stumper: what has Monona County, Iowa, to do with Edgar Allen Poe, the nightmare poet lurking in dusty old lit books? 

"Poe--Onawa?" you ask. "Why, nothing," you say.

Go to the head of the class.

Poe the brooder never came any closer than West Point, NY, but his ideas--one shady one at least--made it all the way out here, even if he never darkened a Siouxland doorway. 

Answer me this: what has Winona to do with Monona, just a quick trip south? 

"Ah," you say, "Both have Indian names--indigenous females, in fact."

Well done. We're on a roll.

Now, what has the character "Minnehaha," in Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," have to do with Winona and Monona?

"All three are sweet Indian maidens," you say?

Yes, and, well, they all die. 

Because no one knows ye' ancient legend that gave rise to a story about this 'Monona,' most history nerds guess--yes, guess--that the story behind Monona county's name was told around the campfires of pioneer white folks, not the Omaha. White folks made up the story, including Monona's death when, heartsick, she tosses herself from the towering banks of the Missouri. White folks made up the whole thing.

Twenty years ago Pipestone, Minnesota, stopped putting on "The Song of Hiawatha," a love story that ends when death strikes the sweet Minnehaha, another beautiful young Indian maiden. Ms. Minnehaha takes no leaps, however. Fever and hunger does her beleaguered heart in. 

Pipestone had been staging the Hiawatha pageant for sixty summers, when, in 2008, they hung up the headdress. Why? A bunch of reasons, but one of them was that the Hiawatha saga--so popular a century before--seemed corny and condescending when acted out by white-faces. In 1855 "The Song of Hiawatha" was not only a best seller, but a cultural sensation. Everyone knew the story, everyone. Wasn't that way 150 years later.

Three legends of the American West, three places and three names--all ending with death, sweet and beautiful women dying.

What has this to do with Mr. E. A. Poe? Poe preached this horrifying idea that if a poem wanted to be beautiful, then it had to have death, because death makes a poem or story beautiful, especially the death of a  young woman. Hence, his own poems, like that prophetic raven repeating "Nevermore" on and on and on.

In a neighborhood that would be called "Monona County," white folks were still arriving decades after The Trail of Tears, but those rough-and-tumble pioneers somehow preferred sad stories of lost love, of heartache and grief amid the huge stretch of their wilderness home. There was plenty of horrors in Minnesota and the Dakotas back then, but for their stories, it seems they preferred Hiawatha to Red Cloud's War, fantasy to real life. 

We still may.   

Quoth the Raven, "Evermore."

from the Native world

All things are the work of the Great Spirit. 

We should know that he is in all things: 

the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, 

and all the four-legged animals, and even the winged people. 

And we should also know 

that He is above all things and all peoples. 

Black Elk, Ogallala Sioux

~   *   ~   *   ~

Black Elk, who witnessed some of the most significant moments of 19th century history--Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn--was a Lakota visionary and holy man known for his explanation of Lakota religion in John Neihardt's telling in Black Elk Speaks, perhaps the most widely known text on Native religion. 

Seriously, in Sioux Center

 

And all of what's here is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Lou Van Dyk, a former teacher and colleague who was just about the lone Democrat in Sioux Center, Iowa, forty years, or so, ago. He used to say that Dems met for their caucuses in a phone booth. Lots of people don't even know what a phone booth is anymore. Be advised, it's tiny.

Yesterday on our way to the Sioux Center Library for a meeting of the Dems, I asked Barb to take a shot at how many protestors would be there for a march--RIGHT HERE IN SIOUX CENTER. She chose not to answer. I told her, honestly, I thought the march against Trump and Ice and Evil itself might be 25-people big. 

Imagine our shock when we drove up and saw a crowd my son-in-law (and others) estimated at 375-400. That's not a figment of my imagination. And while it may not have been last week in Minnesota, it was bone-chilling cold out there. It warn't no picnic, is what I'm saying. But there were literally hundreds-strong.

What followed was the biggest, wildest Dem caucus I can remember.

So there, Lou. Thanks. 

And just in case some can't identify the subjects in the photo above, they're seniors and have been seniors for a long, long time, even residents these days of senior housing. 

Yup, we were there. What a joy.

My home church

Fred and Audrey weren't there. As long as I remember, they lived first door west of us and walked to church like we did, coming in through the north door rather than the main entrance to the south. Fred wore a cigar or a cigar butt between his lips, learned to talk with the dumb thing stuck in the corner. Like so many men in our church, he was a builder of some sort. When I-43 came in, linking Milwaukee and Green Bay with four-lanes, that highway changed the village, making us a bedroom community of descendants of the Dutch immigrant people who'd come more than  a century before, the people who started the church, way back when.

This time, we came in through the south entrance--now substantially larger with a kind of coffee room for chatting after worship. We sat 3/4 of the way back, enough for me to see almost immediately how many souls were no longer there. 

Art and Nell weren't there either. They lived just across the alley, where a couple of apple trees graced a back yard that included the biggest garden on the block. Their son and I got caught smoking upstairs in their garage which became thereafter the greatest crisis of my childhood. Art is at the heart of my first novel, or at least a man much like him. But, like I was saying, he and Nel weren't there either. 

The Smieses weren't there either, nor were the Bloks or Uncle Allie and Aunt Dorothy, nor Trudy, their daughter, although she's still a member, I'm told. Turkey Den Hollander wasn't there, nor was Glen, his son, my age, and Glenn's wife Sally, who was always someone my mom proudly referred to as a relative--just exactly how, I don't know.

There were a couple of Gabrielses and Hendrickses and Veldbooms I recognized, some of whom recognized me as a former son of the congregation. Everyone wasn't new. If I'd dream a head of hair on some of those shiny pates, I could make out one or two faces from my childhood, but let me just tell it straight here: a whole lot of people in the Oostburg CRC weren't there. The souls who were--many of them at least--were not people I knew or remembered.

Maybe ten rows of chairs stood up in front of what pews are left in the sanctuary. I suppose those chairs marked some kind of compromise in worship design. The old blonde benches--padded way back when--still marched from the chairs to the back. When I was a kid, someone carved their initials on the arms at the far end. My dad was livid. I had my suspicions about who vandalized them--those benches were new when I was in grade school--but I don't remember if the powers-that-be ever determined the criminal culprit.

So yesterday, by choice, my wife and daughter and I, home on the lakeshore for a family gathering, worshipped in the church of my childhood, which is what it was, and is, and always will be, I guess, even though by all the empty spaces where people I knew and loved should have been, it was perfectly clear that it wasn't home anymore; even though I'll never forget playing in its empty walls, running upstairs to look out over the unfinished sanctuary from two little closets way up high; even though my Grandpa Dirkse was the chair of the building committee when the place was being sculpted; even though the great, looming cross at the front of the sanctuary was donated by Grandma Dirkse, donated after grandpa's heart attack. It was no longer still my home church, even though I still am suspicious about the kid (he's just about 80 today) who carved his initial in a whole row of brand new pews, even though I remember Glenn Den Hollander or Bob De Smith (Bob senior) cracking open those fancy windows on the west side to let the air circulate through a bit (it could get mighty hot back then on the lakeshore. It would take some wrangling before air conditioning.)

It's no longer my home church, but it's still a church, still home to many others, most of whom I didn't know. 

Some years ago, my home church asked me to speak at their birthday celebration--150 years. I did, a little fearfully for I was never a preacher, always a story-teller. I wrote a rambling narrative about the marriage between my own history and the church's story and hoped it would be okay.

I think it was. I felt good about it that night at their birthday celebration. The audience was likely made up of the same people that were, yesterday, to me at least, strangers, but what I'd told them seemed to me to please them.

Maybe I should have gone to church elsewhere yesterday--we could have. Maybe I should have considered that birthday party my last tango in the church where I grew up. 

Maybe. 

We sat in front of a guy a decade younger than I am, a Gabrielse, who appreciatively shook my hand when worship ceased. "How old were you when you baled hay for my dad?" he asked me. 

Baling hay for his dad was a joy. His dad was a wonderful boss, I remembered. So did he.

Then again, maybe it was a good choice. The absences hurt, but our Sunday morning in the church where I grew up wasn't without its moments, like baling hay for John Gabrielse. "I was just a kid," his son, also retired, told me, "but I remember."

You can't believe everything a writer says, of course, but I think it was Thomas Wolff who titled one of his novels with a phrase that's had a much longer after life than the novel itself--"you can't go home again."

Let me just say, after yesterday, "Yes, you can." It may be a little painful, but yes, you can.

from the Native world

 A bit of wisdom from the Native world.

All things in the world are two. 

In our minds we are two--good and evil. 

With our eyes we see two things, 

things that are fair and things that are ugly. . .

We have the right hand that strikes and makes for evil, 

and we have the left hand, full of kindness and close to the heart. 

One foot may lead us to an evil way; 

the other may lead us to good. 

So are all things two, all two.

Letakota-Lesa, Pawnee, 19th century

~   *   ~   *   ~

Pawnee people (also Paneassa, Pari, Pariki) are a Caddoan-speaking Native American tribe. They are federally recognized as the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma.

Historically, the Pawnee lived along outlying tributaries of the Missouri River: the Platte, Loup and Republican rivers in present-day Nebraska and in northern Kansas. They lived in permanent earth lodge villages where they farmed. They left the villages on seasonal buffalo hunts, using tipis while traveling.

In the 1830s, the Pawnee numbered about 2,000 people, as they had escaped some of the depredations of exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases. By 1859, their numbers were reduced to about 1,400; however, by 1874 they were back up to 2,000. Still subject to encroachment by the Lakota and European Americans, finally most accepted relocation to a reservation in Indian Territory. This is where most of the enrolled members of the nation live today. Their autonym is Chatickas-si-Chaticks, meaning "men of men".

https://www.crystalinks.com/pawnee.html