Me and politics -- 1

I'm quite sure everyone we knew in Arizona was Republican--shoot, even the liberals were Republican, as was the newspaper, the Arizona Republic. The Goldwater effect was very much alive, as was the man with dark-rimmed glasses. In the community where we lived, it was just about impossible to be a Democrat. Besides, my family was Republican, so I'd never done much thinking when it came to politics. The truth?--I'm embarrassed by how conservative I was back then,  but then so was everybody else.

So when we moved to Iowa, I told myself it was time--new place, new times, new rootedness--to participate in American political system, so I did. The Sioux County Republicans were meeting at TePaske Theater on some Thursday night that bicentennial fall, so I went, alone, and sat somewhere  in the back. I was a conservative, but I no right-winger. I'd attended a meeting of the local John Birch Society when I was in high school, a strangely clandestine gathering in the top floor of a lakefront mansion in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, maybe a dozen people who sat around watching a slide/tape program (remember those?) of shots featuring Martin Luther King shaking hands with men who were supposedly known communists. This was Wisconsin, after all, and blood from Sen. McCarthy's whacko hack jobs still pooled in the sandy soil hither and yon.

What I witnessed in TePaske Theater in August, 1976, was a political convention that made me ill because the dialogue was pretty much the same as it was in that little meeting in the lakefront mansion a decade ago. Men--I don't remember seeing any women--would raise their hands and contribute comments drawn from what seemed to me to be Depression-era sentiment. I wanted no part of it. My first political visit in our new home in Iowa was also my last. 

To say it turned me into a Democrat would be presumptive. I would have asked the age-old question back then about tigers changing stripes. It was impossible to think of myself as a Democrat. I didn't know my grandfathers' political leanings, but I knew I didn't have to ask--they were thoroughly Republican, as was my dad. I couldn't have thought of myself as Democratic. They were liberals, the sworn enemy for most of my life.

In the following years I tried to avoid party labels. I voted for McGovern, the prairie populist who promised to end the Vietnam war; but then I went Republican during the Bush years, trying to stay like W and his father somewhere close to the middle.

By '08, I'd had enough conservatism, enough tiddly-winks with wedge issues, enough clap-trap from the conservative world to make me look left, where I saw and heard someone who appeared out of nowhere, a guy with a horrible name that most conservatives opposed, not because he was black--of course, not because he was black. Of course. 

When the Iowa caucuses came around early in 2008, I'm not sure I had a political affiliation, but I had decided opinions, and those opinions formed around two particular candidates, this black guy with the awful name and, of all things, a woman named Hillary. But before the rise of anyone to the top, there were more candidates, including a liberal from New Mexico, Bill Richardson, and John Edwards, a politician a bald guy like me couldn't trust because he had such perfect hair.

___________________ 

Tomorrow--memories of the '08 race.

"Field of Dreams"

It went something like this, I guess. The filmmakers started with sixty pictures of Iowa farms thought to be possibilities for making this movie. What they wanted, of course, was endless cornfields where there was the fairly substantial promise that the crop would come up tall and healthy, and where, out west of the place ("if you build it, they will come") gorgeous sunsets would delight the evening sky. 

So, the story goes that the woman appointed to do the choosing, a woman named Sue Reidel, got to a photograph of the Lansing farmstead, down a lonely gravel road, and, just like that, went for it--"perfect." The truth is that they trucked in water early that summer, pulled it all the way from Lake Michigan, because they needed to be sure that the corn that season would reach optimum height. Otherwise, once the decision was made, the Lansing place started to take shape as a baseball diamond.

The man who wrote the book Shoeless Joe that became the movie is a Canadian writer named W. P. Kinsella, who went on to have a successful career as a novelist and died ten years ago already. The story, the novel, and the film all employ what people call magical realism--no, gangs of dead baseball players didn't come walking out of the corn like they do so gracefully in the movie. That's magic realism.

Thursday night, the Minnesota Twins will face off against the Philadelphia Phillies, real, live professional teams, not spirits or ghosts or fantasies. Tickets are long gone, but Netflix will put the game up for those of us who can't make it all the way across the state. 

That t-shirt at the top of the page is mine, purchased for me by an old friend who told me some time in the 90s that he was taking his family out east and stopping at Dyersville just to see "the field of dreams." He was just eccentric enough to do that, so I told him, jokingly, to pick me up a t-shirt. He did. 

Sometime later, this old friend was killed on a Sioux Center street when struck by a truck. That death--and something of his life--is somewhere in it, a stain in the old t-shirt only my eyes can see. It can't be removed. It's not just another t-shirt. It's been with me for decades.

Anyway, I'll be watching Thursday night. 

A Joey photo shoot*

It was the kind of little shack that had no use whatsoever. It stood behind their house, just off the alley out back, and when the old retired farmer and his wife decided, once and for all, to get rid of the thing, someone came along, picked it up, and hauled it off.

Unearthing thereby a nest of opossums suddenly turned up, four or five joeys (little possums) totally incapable of escaping the back of the old lady's spade. Our kids were kids, and they were out back, witness to the carnage. The old woman showed no mercy. They came home heavy with grief, anger, and total disbelief.

Me? They were only opossums.

I hit one with our brand-new, silver '64 Impala, just weeks after getting my license. I was driving a party of teenagers around to school that night, on our way to the prom, specially selected as cool sophomore servers. I know exactly where I hit that beady-eyed beast--it was just a couple miles from Hingham. Whack! Thump! All night long I heard that sound. That death haunted the prom. And it was only an opossum.

Truth is, I've often wondered what kind of joke the Lord perpetuated on us when he created the opossum, ugly rooters with eerie pink hands and a fleshy pig snout to match. What a mistake. 

When I was no older than my kids were that day in the alley, I saw one shot dead. I was out on a trap line with a loving man the prototype for the father in my first novel, Home Free. 

His father gave him the flashlight, aimed, and squeezed the trigger of the .22. The shot was muffled, silenced. They stood there, waiting for the motion to cease. The animal pawed at its forehead, at the perfect hole between its eyes, as if somehow it could scratch out the lead. "Possum," his father had said, as if it were some kind of eulogy.

My words, my sentences, years ago, drawn from my childhood experience of the first murder I'd ever seen. But it was only a 'possum.

So 'possums and me, we've got enough of a history, enough for me to recognize this little one coming up the trail toward me yesterday (see him up top?) on a sunny winter solstice afternoon. I knew 'possums didn't see well, and the wind was at his back, not mine. So I stood still, camera in hand, while Joey snooted around along the well-traveled back road along the river. 

In fact, kept coming at me as if I weren't there, kept coming until I barked at him to let him know that I wasn't just some cottonwood. He snarled a little and wiggled off--opossums come from the factory with only low gear. 

So I shot this little one with a camera, walked back home, and opened the files. 

Now pardon me for giggling. But what I found is a regular portrait gallery. It was as if Joey is coming up on graduation, and he or she wanted a senior portrait. I might not have chosen the season (first day of winter) or the place (a foot of snow on a river bank), but this Joey in buffalo coat was determined. I don't know why I say it, but this he has got to be a she. 

So here's Joey, class of '17, River Floyd High. She needs something comely for the high school annual. I'll send her proofs today. I know where to find her. 

Got a favorite? Here's a sexy little peek-a-boo.

This one left her a bit more exposed. Darling pose though, isn't it?

Got a couple of her outside the weeds too.

Tried something full body, with less than wonderful results. That winter fur makes you think her roots are gray. They are, I guess. But I'm thinking there's something in this pose a little cheeky for a high school girl, don't you think? But then, nowadays. . .

My favorite? Something close up, even though I think I'd have preferred a bit of powder on her nose.

Now at least she's got possibilities. I hope she's not too picky--she didn't seem to be yesterday. 

I swear I always thought the Creator of Heaven and Earth simply released possums out into the world about a week or so before he had the design down. 

But I've got to admit it--this Joey is almost cute. 

________________________________

*from December 21, 2016

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“When I kept silent, 

my bones wasted away 

through my groaning all day long”

I’m not sure I know why myself—and I’m not sure I want to know—but one of the first novels I read that simply wouldn’t exit the chambers of my heart was Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope, a novel of sin and self-righteousness, set in apartheid South Africa. The pulsating portrayal of Pieter van Vlaanderin’s guilt simply wouldn’t let me alone. I became him—like I said, I don’t know why.

Van Vlaanderin, a police officer sworn to uphold laws which keep races apart, has sexual relations with a black woman. His marriage is cold and stultifying, but he knows very well that his sin is not his wife’s fault. In the face of his own overwhelming desire, he falls. But he doesn’t get away with it, and the truth comes out.

The real horror of the story, however, is his inability to find forgiveness. The sorrow in his heart just won’t go away.

Too Late the Phalarope put me through agonies more terrifying than any I’d ever undergone myself when, as an undergraduate, I read the novel. When van Vlaanderin kept silent, his bones wasted away through his groaning all day long, and so did mine. Reading the novel was excruciating, and that’s why it was so memorable.

And I’m not sure that’s why, perhaps, Too Late the Phalarope comes to mind when I read the third verse of Psalm 32: I can’t help thinking of the bone-wasting agonies of Pieter van Vlaanderin, a white man from apartheid South Africa and a supposedly God-fearing family, a man who couldn’t find forgiveness.

Post the Bathsheeba-saga, David’s bones shook with horror and guilt at what he’d done. We know that’s true, after all, from Psalm 51. “My sin is always before me,” David says, after Nathan let him know the truth. Full of misery, David asks the Lord for forgiveness: “Let the bones you have crushed rejoice.”

Some scholars speculate that Psalm 32 should really be Psalm 52. The 32nd Psalm seems, after all, a kind of retrospective poem David might have written to explain exactly what happened when finally he found the forgiveness he was looking for in Psalm 51. “This is how it went,” he seems to say. Then he explains how it was that he acknowledged his sin and confessed. David’s songs—both 32 and 52—record the reality of God’s forgiveness only because they first acknowledge the reality of his sin, or so it seems to me.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Psalm 32 begins in defining blessedness as the condition of the forgiven, the state of mind and soul of those who know that every last inch of the blackened corners of their hearts have been scoured, those who don’t try to cover things, those who conceal nothing from the watchful eyes of God—as if they could.

I sometimes wonder whether those who confess faith in God can really know his grace if they haven’t known their own sin, if they haven’t felt the groaning of their bones, as David says, if they haven’t felt something of to the horror that Pieter van Vlaanderin knew—as did David.

Answer me this: how can anyone know grace without knowing sin?

Change

My heart doesn't know exactly how to take this. On the one hand, it creates a smile because the picture, ten years old now, shows grandkids as kids. They still are, of course, especially to a grandpa, but they no longer wear those clothes. They can't. They're a decade older.

Ian, the youngest, will be a junior in high school. Pieter, who's wearing a t-shirt from his uncle and aunt in Stillwater, does all kinds of maintenance work at a plant just outside of town that spins E10 gas out of endless acres of corn all around. He's also in love.

And the high-schooler, back then, the girl holding the dog, is twice a mom, a young married. 

Oh, yes--I said my heart doesn't know how to take that picture on top because we don't really reverse time, and there's a bounty of sweet sadness to that picture because it captures a world that's gone. That's sadness. 

But then there's this too.

 

Just a couple of days ago--that high schooler's second cherub. That's sweet.

Great Plains

 

Ten years ago, a colleague and I led an excursion west of here, into the Great Plains--the mandate? to meet and greet one of the continent's most stunning regions, a place blessed with huge skies and endless ranges. 

When I look at these photographs from that experience, I am--even today, a decade ago--still wondrously blessed.

Every year at Yellowstone, someone gets hurt by the monarchs of the plains. We made it through without injury and all of us were greatly blessed.

"like an umbrella"

Sometimes it seems that the present administration is capable of producing a few rollicking old stories as good as anything from the pens of Gilbert and Sullivan. I mean, there are far bigger stories, far more reasons to despair than the new, sickly green color of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. There is a war in Iran--or is there? There's a newly invigorated socialist movement in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There's an ancient overweight would-be monarch who seems utterly incapable of holding on to power, given polls that increasingly and convincingly make him look like a loser. And there's a few moments of sheer hilarity.

Those off-color reflecting pools have been raising a stink for weeks already, but last week they turned into created a flood of madness when Janine Pirro, one of Trump's oldest and most trusted buddies and recently named the U.S. District Attorney for DC, ushered her own version of the truth into the fray and blamed the horror on shoddy workmanship, an indictment that made another explanation loyalist in Trumpster camp look, well, dumb, former gov of North Dakota, Doug Bergum. It  appears that there was long ago on capitol hill some bad blood coursing through both of their veins toward or with each other--about what I don't know. 

Trump, who is not practiced at keeping his mouth shut, laid into his old friend (and Fox News-er), Ms. Pirro, offering her newly documented explanation for the green mess on incompetent handlers. That did not sit well with the boss, who characterized Ms. Pirro's new explanation memorably, by saying "she folded like an umbrella," a line that set lips a grinnin' all over town. Yet that day, the Fox News barrister was spotted leaving her office complex all by her lonesome, packing enough ammunition to end the battle, if not the war. 

What happened? It's unclear, except it seems that the meeting with the king left him mellowed a bit, in a state of mind a few notches below "fold like an umbrella."

Much ado, much ado.

Sometimes I wonder what the American public will expect of his immediate successors--MAGA or not. This one has made the f-word pretty much standard political dialect. He's strangely off -key more often than a kid trying the violin. His anger at one of his oldest and trusted friends resulted from his having to field questions about her refusing to stay with his much preferred vandalism story, the explanation he liked, true or not. Trump goes unhinged because one of his trusted lieutenants told the truth when a lie was the much-preferred route , or so he directed. 

Are we going to take that from whoever replaces him in two years? Are we going to want another number 1 who blows a gasket when someone tells the truth? Can there be another? Are there others? 

I don't know. I'd like to believe he's one of a kind.