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. 

Morning Thanks--Copilot

Grandpa Schaap, the preacher and the little guy right there at the horse's snoot, didn't take Abraham Kuyper, the preacher/politician with him when he immigrated. In fact, he didn't even immigrate--his parents did, in 1868, left the Frisian island of Terschelling and made their way to America soon after the America's Civil War. 

Grandpa, the little guy, was born here. Abraham Kuyper was growing in prominence about then, but he hadn't achieved the stardom that he did when he became the Dutch Prime Minister in 1901.

When I found Kuyper's book of meditations, To Be Near Unto God, in English, in his library, I was greatly taken by my find because that's the book I'd  heard was so frequently lugged along with Dutch immigrants from the turn of the century--1900-1917, much beloved by those who suddenly found themselves here, aliens in a land as strange as it was huge.

One of the meditations began with the wonder of this new technology then sweeping Holland (and elsewhere too, I'm sure). Pastor Kuyper thought to reassure the flock that the telephone would not alter how the people lived, and that, in fact, the phone offered remarkable attributes ordinary people like those who read his meditations in the  newspaper should not be afraid because the Lord God of Hosts gave us blessings like the telephone for our good usage.

It would take me awhile to find that meditation, but you get my drift. Kuyper was being Kuyper, telling believers they should not be afraid of the world.

Yesterday, I asked MS Copilot to draw me a map to explain where, in 1823, the Arikara fought Ashley's band of mountain men--ninety-strong--out west on the Missouri River. I didn't realize until yesterday that that bloody fight took place close to Mobridge, SD, a place I've been often enough to know its look. MSCopilot is MS's AI. I was asking AI to do something elementary, but something I'd never asked before, to create a map.

Now let me be clear here. President Trump, who so regularly shows himself to be a fool, knows how to ask AI to do things--like that wicked cartoon of him in a red shawl looking for all the world like deity, and helping someone bedridden. You remember. I'm saying  that, regrettably, Donald Trump, who is older than I am, knows more about AI than yours truly. But yesterday I accomplished the creation of a map--supposedly accurate--of exactly where on the Missouri River that famous attack took place, and, as predicted, it did. Here 'tis.

For the record, you will not find that map anywhere else. I created it--with the strong armed help of AI. 

Kuyper was talking about the telephone, but he wasn't wrong. Innovations in technology have to be studied to be sure that the benefits they give us exceed the problems that accompany them. 

This morning this old Kuyperian is thankful for AI--wary but thankful.

Morning Thanks--Handel's "Messiah"

On Saturday night, I couldn't help but realize that I know almost the entirety of George Frederick Handel's oratorio The Messiah by heart. Don't tell anyone, but for most of the night I hummed along--not loud enough to be heard, but loud enough to for my heart to adore its familiarity.

It would be impossible to guess at how many times I've listened in, although I'm confident that the number of live performances reach nowhere near the times I've tapped into recordings. In fact, I dare to bet that with a little time I could scare up a recording or two on a long ago forsaken disk hidden away somewhere. 

I've sung along with our congregation's ritual recital of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" at Christmas, although I'm not a regular, less sure as I am of my abilities than I am of a hundred others.

What's more, I've heard dozens of choirs move through big chunks of the oratorio, including, forty years ago, a grade school bunch I've never forgotten, perhaps because of their insistent conductor who, I'm sure, wanted each of those kids to have a real experience with real music. It was an oddity, a painful experience and a thrill I've never quite been able to forget.

Mostly George Frederick Handel rings through my memories of houses we've lived in for the last fifty years. It wouldn't be a Christmas or Easter season if, on a Sunday morning, Handel wasn't coming up through living room speakers. We Protestants have winnowed down the number of legitimate sacraments to two--baptism and the Lord's Supper. But Handel's Messiah has a long and sacred reach. Voluntarily and of a sudden, we simply stand--all of us do--for "The Hallelujah Chorus."

Saturday night was a wonder. A mass choir of locals, with orchestra, did it all, even the arias I don't know, stem to stern. It was wonderful, as it always is, even when there's no in the chorus older than 12. It's always wonderful, and it will be again next December when I tease Alexa into finding a performance for me somewhere on line. 

A few years ago, I would have put singing through Handel's Messiah with a really good choir as a top choice on my bucket list. But Saturday night, listening in once more, I told myself that the likelihood of music coming from this aging vessel is no more likely than this ex-catcher getting behind the plate and throwing out some speedster trying to steal second. It ain't gonna happen. I'm having trouble enough just getting to my feet when the first chords of "Hallelujah" fill the place.

Every minute last Saturday night was precious, every note a blessing. 

This morning's thanks are for a big, wonderful choir, the Sioux County Oratorio, and, once again, George Frederick Handel's perfectly wondrous baroque masterpiece, The Messiah.   

Morning Thanks--BHHS '72

 

They met yesterday. I wasn't among 'em. I was invited, but the invitation came so late that I  had  no time to plan to get there; at my age, just taking off cold is something you remember achingly like The Dave Clark Five or Gunsmoke. Sixteen old folks showed up here at the restaurant in Darlington, Wisconsin yesterday, 16 members of the 1972 graduating class of Blackhawk High, my first teaching job. They had a reunion, and I didn't get my invite until late last week.

But honestly, who knows if I would have taken a day's travel if I'd have received that invite earlier. Wishful thinking on my part, although when I texted the Jeff (third from the left, back row) he told me there's another reunion planned for August. I may try. Try.

Some of these faces I remember, but certainly not all. Blessedly, Jeff named the Class of '72ers, or I'd have spent unforgiveable amounts of time trying to determine who looked like this all these years later because for me, their fresh-out-of-college English teacher, they will forever be 18 years old. 

Strangely enough I remember thinking, back then, there would come a time when I'd be 65, and they would be 60, the years between us largely indistinguishable. We'll, we're there, and have been for a couple of decades already. If I'd walk into a bait store with these gents, nobody would wonder who is the old fart with 'em.

But this morning I'm greatly thankful for them--I really am. Let me count the ways.

1-They taught me who I was and who I would be--a good teacher, a not so good coach.

2-They let me be a friend without being a sidekick.

3-They taught me that my wooden shoes were a fashion accessory.

4-They made faith bigger than I'd known it to be, not smaller.

5-They were friends when I had few. 

6-They taught me how to teach; they taught me the beauty of literature.

7-They helped me understand that they--each of them--were real people, not just faces in those classroom chairs. 

There's more too, I'm sure. The fact is, they're forever in me, in memories that rise unbidden from wherever the soul keeps them, a thousand comic operas that emerge every once in a while to be dusted off and restored.

This morning after a reunion I missed, I'm thankful for Blackhawk High School's Class of 1972, the kids that brought me to school. 

______________________________ 

The old BHHS Yearbooks are long gone in the flood that took out the goods in our bottom floor, but this old award plaque somehow made it through the mess, even though what it says is barely visible: "James C. Schaap," it says, up top, then "To the greatest play director, teacher & friend we could ever have. Blackhawk High School, "Up the Down Staircase" Cast, 1971.

Must have got in the water somehow--the wood around the tacks is shaded if you look close, but it's still readable.