Happiness

It's a gem I found six years ago, put up here for all kinds of people to see, then, sadly, never hit the publish. Thus, while it appears forever in my list of posts, no one else, save Joyce Sutphen readers, ever saw it. 

But it's hers, a Joyce Sutphen poem, a woman I never met. I've never heard from her read several collections of poems, even though she lives not so far away, regionally that is. She is an emeritus professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus University in St. Peter, MN, lives and works in Lutheran Minnesota. Every once in a while I have spent time with her poems and always found her world both recognizable and blessedly worthy. 

I intended sometime back in 2001 to create a post out of this poem--and never did. Just happened to turn it up this morning, six years after leaving it in the blog. I don't know why I never hit the Publish button, but the poem is as worthy today as it was then. So, a little late maybe, but just as healthy as ever--this Joyce Sutphen poem titled something hugely impossible to define and therefore compelling to try:

Happiness
by Joyce Sutphen

This was when my daughters were just children
playing on the rocky shore of the lake,

their hair in braids, their bright-colored jackets
tied around their waists. It was afternoon,

the shadows falling away, their faces
glowing with light. Whatever we said then

(and it must have been happy; it must have
been hopeful) is lost as I am now lost

from that life I lived. This was when nothing
that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted

was happiness, pure happiness, simple
as strawberries and cream in a saucer,

as curtains floating from a window sill,
as small pairs of shoes arranged in a row.

What's  unmistakable is the insistence of its regret, a conceit in poetry as old as any stanzas you might consider; the confession in the poem is as far from happiness as you might imagine ("Whatever we said then (and must have been happy; it must have/been hopeful") is lost as I am now lost"--a sad dark and soul-full confession. even though the list of unforgotten images prompt a fleeting smile.  

If I say this Sutphen is very "Lutheran," I might just as well say it's very Calvinist; there a mixture of "strawberries and cream in a saucer" set out as if to sweeten a dogged unsweetened reality: ". . .This is when nothing/that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted/was happiness," she says in a confession not to be missed. 

Simply to awaken our senses to her wistful moments is a gift.

Hegseth holds forth

Here's how AI describes D-Day, June 6, 1944: "D‑Day was a 50‑mile‑wide, multi‑national assault involving 156,000 troops, 7,000 ships, 12,000 aircraft, and 23,000 airborne soldiers, opening the door to the liberation of Europe."

That's a terrifying description, but a very helpful summary of an event that altered the world we live in yet today. The Allied invasion on June 6, 1944, was massive--just imagine how much sky is required for 12,000 aircraft, how much English channel it requires to float 7000 ships. 

D-Day remembrance celebrations are held worldwide, of course, since so much of the world was tightly wound in to the war-time fantasies of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The presence of the U.S. of A. was unmistakable, and while, in judgement, it's altogether possible for this "sweet land of liberty" to look past the immense contributions of other Allied nations, it's impossible not to acknowledge the heft of American gifts, including much of the action on Utah Beach (most fiercely defended by the Axis powers) and the entire paratrooper fleet dropped into enemy territory before dawn on June 6.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a decorated war veteran himself, spoke last week at the D-Day Commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery, and used the occasion to warn celebrants that the problems created by immigration were just as threatening as the Axis powers' taking over Europe during the early years of World War II.

The speech--and especially that comparison--was roundly criticized, as it well should have been. 

The very real problems created by significant immigration--especially illegal immigration--have no contemporary corollary, especially illegal immigration, which is undertaken only by those who would like to find freedom somewhere far away from a culture where they live, a culture in which liberty has literal meaning.

Where does the Secretary get such errant comparisons?

Easy. From his boss.

  “The Mighty One, God, the LORD, 

speaks and summons the earth 

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.”

 As far as I know, the county in which I live, Sioux County, Iowa, has no citizens of Sioux descent. What’s more, the town in which I lived for forty years—Sioux Center—is in no way a "center for the Sioux."  For most of 150 years now, it’s been a center for the Dutch, who were and are of no close relation to the Sioux. There lies a tale, of course, one that everyone knows: here and elsewhere across the plains, we won and they lost.

 A friend of mine, a congenial soul who loved repairing bridges we built with our prejudices, once asked a Sioux religious man to visit the college where I taught, asked him to speak in chapel.  Because chapel was a religious event, our guest took with him a sacred pipe.  Before he spoke, he lit the pipe, then turned to the four directions and led paleface kids through a ceremony meant to evoke God’s presence.

The symbolism, Black Elk says, works something like this:  the south brings warmth and new life in spring; the east, peace and light; the north is the source of cold, and thereby strength of character; and the from the west comes thunder and rain.  By raising the pipe to the four directions, the Lakota traditionally believe the spirits of the directions—all part of the God of the universe, Wakan Tanka—were being invoked for aid and comfort and trust throughout the ceremony.

 Such things simply aren’t done in the center for the Dutch. Some kids hit the warpath. What on earth was a pagan doing with holy smoke, bowing to the four winds or whatever?  The whole thing was, to some of them—and their parents--off-the-map heathen.

The opening lines of the mighty song of Psalm 50 make me wonder if the psalmist—whoever he was—would mind beginning worship with some sense of God’s hugeness, some kind of ritual meant to point towards a deity who is forever outside of time and space.      

 Honestly, I hear more Lakota in verse one than in a lot of evangelical Christianity.  Interesting, isn’t it, that the psalmist actually begins with three names—“the mighty one, God, the Lord”—each of which, in ancient Hebrew defined slightly different dimensions.  It’s as if the poet really wants to get all of this deity covered.  He doesn’t want to miss a characteristic.  He knows he can’t get all of God in focus, but, in humility, he wants to do the best he can, so he invokes with every possible name.

The second half of verse one moves east to west, not unlike the Sioux ritual.  There’s no sacred pipe here, but it doesn’t take all that much imagination for us to picture the possibility that some ancient Hebrew may have gestured just as broadly as that Native guy in our chapel.  To me, the line just feels Native.

One pair of seemingly irreconcilable characteristics of our God is that he is, at once, both imminent—right here beside us—and transcendent—forever somewhere beyond us.  The opening lines of Psalm 50 force us to consider his transcendence. Most of us, I think, would prefer a teddy bear.

 In fact, it’s not all that difficult to make verse one sound, well, primitive.  Give me a pipe, or an eagle feather and a smudge pot, I bet I could recite it in our college chapel this week and set some sweetly self-righteous kids on a heresy hunt. 

 But then, there’s not a Lakota in the neighborhood.  

June 6

June 7 will forever be "June 7," but to me June 6 will forever be something different, not because someone I knew was there on a beach in Normandy, but because of what went down there. Everyone connected with the secrecy of the operation on D-Day knew that the invasion would cost the Allied powers thousands of lives and it did--over 4000, with an equal number on the German side, if not more, considerably more. 

I don't know what goes on today, but the Memorial Day celebrations in my hometown, way back when, used to include--feature, in fact--the hometown vets from World War II. There were dozens of them when I was a boy, the wars in Europe and the South Pacific only a decade behind us.

But one of those vets always lit my childhood imagination more than others because my dad gave that man special honors, not because of memorable bouts of unquestionable heroism but because of where that WWII vet served--he was there, at Normandy, on June 6. Honestly, I don't know if my own perception is right--whether a man named "Linky" was there on the beach or not--but I know his face will forever be the face of D-Day in my mind because I'm quite sure my dad told me, long ago, that he was, and my boyhood imagination placed him there, on those killing beaches. 

"Linky" made it, even though 4000 of his buddies did not. He and his family lived just outside of town in a big corner house where he pulled on his khakis every Memorial Day for the parade. To my mind, he wasn't just a vet--lots of men my dad's age were vets; he was special because he was in one of those barge-like landing crafts, the LCVPs, as they were called; he was among those emptied onto Omaha Beach with thousands of others, many hundreds of whom would never move another step. Linky made it. When he'd march by on Memorial Day, I used to dream of the stories he could tell--if he chose to, and not every vet did. He was there.

My dad spent D-Day in the South Pacific aboard the kind of tugboat whose job it was to move battleships around foreign harbors. I don't know this for certain, but I can't help but believe that he never pulled on his Coast Guard uniform after the war because he believed in his heart that because he'd never seen action, spent his years of service on a tugboat, Memorial Day was meant for the Linkys, not the guys who never heard a bullet slash the air. 

Today is Linky's day--that's what I can't help feeling. Last weekend we went to Pressure, a finely crafted movie whose heart is in the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944. 

My mother-in-law lost her fiancé this morning, 82 years ago, June 6, 1944. His name was TerHorst, and he was trained as an engineer. His job that morning to demolish the "hedgehogs," as they were called, the sharp obstructions meant to keep the Allies off the beaches. I don't think he got out of his LCVP. 

In this country, that June 6 is not a holiday doesn't mean it's not somehow remembered, even by those who wouldn't be born until after the end of the Second World War.

I wasn't born until 1948, but that doesn't mean I don't remember. Lots of us haven't and won't. 

And that, I'd like to think, is as it should be.

This morning I'm thankful for an abundance of gifts on this June 6.

Kit Carson and Singing Grass

 

 Christopher Carson, people said, would expose himself to the full light of the campfire only when he lit a pipe. His closest companions were his pistols and the rifle he kept beside him even when he slept.

Daniel Boone stood no taller than 5'8"--not a peewee, but by no standards was he physically formidable. For the record, Davy Crockett, coonskin cap and all, was no bigger; in fact, Crockett would have measured up equally had the two of them ever stood toe to toe. The real Kit Carson, who ranks with Boone and Crockett in legendary prominence as American frontiersman, was even smaller--5'6" in stocking feet, wiry and by no means muscle-bound. Mythically, however, Kit Carson was a giant.

For a man who lacked any formal education, Carson was smart, even cagey, a quick learner who determined in a hurry how to get along in the American frontier of the early 1800s.  As a trapper and frontiersman, he could converse--I'm serious!--in Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Piute and Ute, and he knew the sign language used by mountain men throughout the West.

I don't need to say that the diminutive Carson was a tough cookie, but he was, even though he was never, ever so full of himself that he'd tell you he was. He just was. 

He must have looked like a wimp to a French-Canadian trapper named Joseph Chouinard. Seems an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, quite the looker, people say, got courted by both of them at a "Rendezvous" somewhere around what would become Fort Laramie, in what would become southern Wyoming. The event--for the record--would be the last annual "Rendezvouz" on the Upper Plains, an annual event when the entire congregation of mountain men went sort of nuts, binging for a week or so, drinking and gambling, swapping stories and then doing more drinking and gambling. Was, for certain, a high, old time.

Oh yes, and "womaning." In other words, a little of everything, and not a Sunday School picnic.  The sharp edge between Kit Carson and this  French trapper named Chouinard was put there by an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, who found herself the subject of both men's attention because neither of them could take their eyes off her.

Guns were drawn, shots were fired, and in what must have been an unusual duel--it was on horseback. Chouinard's shots struck nothing of any danger on Kit Carson, but Carson's shots ripped the man's thumb off his hand. Singing Grass left the shooting match with Kit Carson, who, by all accounts, had been already her chosen victor.

Together, Carson and his French wife had two girls; the complications of the second birth took the life of Singing Grass and sent Carson into deep grief.

Kit Carson was a hero to thousands of 19th century readers, who ate up the Carson stories regardless of the stories' authenticity. 

And he was, you better believe, at best a part-time hero. Ask any Navajo about Kit Carson and the Long Walk, and be ready to field some authentic anger, a wild west guy whose famous pistols, even at night, were always half-cocked.

At least we know he's no commie

  

   "Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” 

Sleep well tonight. The Nightwatchman is awake, tweeting old fears. 

A poisoned candidacy

Feenstra, with glasses, behind the President

He is, by any definition save one, my brother. He is kindred, not family but closer to me than anyone else making national news this morning. He is--or was--a leading Republican candidate to become Governor of Iowa, his home state. He is--and will forever be--a child of Sioux County, Iowa, a man whose birthright is "Dutch Reformed," by birthright, if not by choice.

He grew up here, went to private, Christian schools, Dordt College (now University), where, several years later, (as did I) he taught. In the doctrinal language of the heritage he and I share, he's a "covenant child," born and baptized in a tradition whose history and character I've wandered through for most of my life.

I should, one would think, support his candidacy to be the next Governor of the state of Iowa (he is running, or was, until last night). Not only was he running, he was also the favorite, given his husky endorsement by the President just last week. Trump was for Randy Feenstra for Gov. "He's in," people thought.

Sorry. Yesterday, despite that hefty, prized endorsement, he lost. He has conceded.

Every news network used his loss as one of its headlines after yesterday's series of primary elections. He wasn't alone on the ballot; he was one of three candidates for gov, only two of which were positioned to grab the nomination. He came in second, lost the race by just 1500 votes. His loss was a huge story, a national headline because of someone else: he held the golden support of a man who's shown himself once again, recently, to be the ticket to victory. This time it may have been the kiss of death; Trump's support didn't do the job--his hand-picked boy and Dordt's most famous graduate went down to defeat.

And I voted against him. I didn't campaign against him, didn't say a word or write a sentence saying mean things or disparaging his candidacy; but neither did I vote for him, a fine man, a brother Hollander. I didn't vote against him; I voted in the Democratic primary for the man who did win his party's nomination--Josh Turek, a relative newcomer who opposes most everything our President, and Randy Feenstra, stands for. 

And there lies the difference. I don't know if it occurred by choice or request, but President Trump's endorsement of Randy Feenstra soured me. I wasn't registered to vote Republican anyway, but even if I had been, Trump's endorsement would have sunk anyone else's candidacy in my estimation too.

What the headlines missed is the significant issue of private education. Recently, in the state, more funding has found its way into private (in this case, Christian) education. Trump supports it, so did Randy Feenstra, with his family, his politics, and his contributions. 

That commitment was likely sufficient--even here-- to bring down his candidacy. He did well, just not good enough to win, and the difference, last night, between winning and losing, in his case, could well have been the voters, even here in Sioux County, his home, many of whom have opposed increased state aid for private education. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I'm sure, some people who love Trump don't like state funding of private education. No national news sources I saw this morning mentioned that in their analysis.

I'm sad about it, but, truthfully, I feel more sad that a man with his moral framework (which is to say, a moral framework I understand) would covet the endorsement of a man like Donald Trump (28 tweets in the last 24 hours). 

For me, Trump's support--and Feenstra's whole-hearted acceptance thereof--was cause enough to avoid him and his poisoned candidacy.