"A Separate Place" (ii)

I'd like to know Mrs. Arie Franken, at least more about her than Google can discover, why she sat down and wrote this passionate poem, stuck it in an envelope, and sent it to the newspaper. What made her the kind of disciple she had to have been? Why did she map out the depth of her commitment and try to make all sing?

She was twice married. Her first husband lost his first wife and a child in a tornado that swept through Sioux County in 1895. When sickness took him, she married again, and had children with both husbands. She must have written other poems, but it's unlikely they exist. This one was filed away in the scrapbooks of an aged aunt who died a year ago. 

But there's more to Mrs. Franken's poem. We're only now arriving at its vital destination.

"Therefore," she says. We've come to the heart of things.

Therefore her covenant youth must be
In truth instructed separately.
This carnal world in which we live
Can never true instruction give.
Like home and church our schools must be
Free from all world conformity.

It's all been foundation for an argument for a Christian school--a place where "covenant children" receive a Christian education, "free from all world conformity."

The Lord commands us: 'Teach thy youth
The unvarnished truth'.
Yes, teach it, though that very Word
Strikes always as a two-edged sword.
Teach it in home and church and school
For your entire life a rule.

Mrs. Arie Franken is looking to nail down the argument for a Christian school once and for all. Her next stanza can't be contained in six lines as most of them are. It requires an extra couplet but stays steadfastly driven by the command form. Why? "Because 'tis a Divine decree."

Instruct, then, and instructed be,
Because 'tis a Divine decree.
Teach them that they may be as youth
Securely founded in the truth.
And thus learn to evaluate
All things of home, and church and state
Intelligently to take their place
Tho' in this world, a separate race.

The task of the Christian school, she claims, is to evaluate, to learn to be critical of "the world," as she herself has piously been. 

She knew what she was advocating was no calk walk. For a moment at least, she seems to acknowledge that is not so simple. She wants Christian scholars "to take their place" in the world, but be biblically sure they remain "a separate race." That has to be said. "In, but not of"--hard as balancing those two is. Maybe that's why it took her an extra two lines.

The party of the living God;
Their feet with preparation shod
Against all wickedness arrayed.
The armor of our God displayed
And thus ascend to Zion's hill,
According to his sovereign will.

"Ascend to Zion's hill." Amazing language, isn't it? I've been a graduation speaker at a dozen Christian school commencements and never once got anywhere near to telling students to "ascend to Zion's hill." 

Maybe I should have. How we once said what we used to say can seem shocking, even though it wasn't to the pioneer Mrs. Arie Franken less than a century ago. I wonder if my never using that language would have been more shocking to her.

Oh, youth, if ye be truly wise,
And keep this goal before your eyes,
The world shall give you no real name,
You will not see her halls of fame,
Nor share her culture and renown;
But you shall wear the victor's crown.

The paradigms that underlie all of this, as traditionally hefty as they are, sound museum-like, even a bit silly--"halls of fame," "victor's crown." I know very well what she's saying, but it's expressed in words and phrases so strange that it could just as well be written in Dutch.

If I were a Christian high school teacher, an English teacher, I'd give my students this assignment: read Mrs. Franken's poem and put its meaning in your own words. I wonder how tough that assignment might be. I'd love to know.

But there's one more eight-liner, the final stanza of her plea, the poem's own doxology:

Oh Lord, our Lord, enthroned above,
Look down in faithfulness and love.
Let shame and death o'erwhelm our foes
Who would Thy servant's way oppose.
Let us of all thy good partake.
We ask it, Lord, for Thy Name's sake.
To Thee all praise and glory be,
Now and to all eternity.

This expansive grasp of the Christian faith is cosmic. That she even feels the necessity of addressing the Creator of all things and bowing before him at poem's end seems, well, almost medieval, doesn't it? In a time when piety is all about "personal relationships," the sense of God as king seems ancient, even standoff-ish.  

My parents made Christian schools into litmus paper. I spent just about all of my professional life in a Christian college. My kids attended Christian schools, as do theirs today. Still, I find this old poem, probably written 75 years ago by a farm wife, amazing.

But then, I'm guessing there's probably a lot more wisdom in the attic.
_____________________ 

Thanks to a reader for pointing out yesterday that the photograph is not Mrs. Franken, but belongs to Dorthea Lange, who was shooting photographs for the government during the Great Depression. 

A Separate Place (i)

We move amidst a world today
Of unrest, clamor and dismay;
A world steeped high in guilt and sin;
That has no love or peace within;
In which iniquities increase;
That does not know the way of peace.

The only real clue as to the age of this old poem from the attic* is the newspaper that published it had a bi-lingual readership. Everything but the poem and the ads are in Dutch. Maybe 1940s, I'm guessing. Perhaps earlier.

The rhetoric, however, is ageless. Christians have been prophesying end times since Christ himself warned his disciples to keep their eyes on the skies. That's 2000 years.

A world that seeks to overthrow
All God has given his saints to know;
That cunningly with devilish sway
Seeks to entice the church away.
Against the church their boast is hurled
That man shall make a better world.

"Want proof of end times?"--the poet asks. It's God-denying humanism, the heresy that man, not God, can and shall "make a better world." It can't be a century-old. I'm thinking this Mrs. Franken, if I'm right, was born in 1878 and died in 1962.

Be not deceived, O Church, be wise.
The future that before us lies
Shall be still darker than before.
God's word foretells what lies in store.
That times of much distress shall be,
And times of great apostacy.

I'm not sure what grammatical rules Mrs. Franken is following by granting Church upper-case reference, but she probably means to be speaking of "the church universal," a designation that may well have clarified for her what that Church was. Eighty years later, I'm probably not as sure as she is or was.

But she is. And she's also forsworn to believe that in this life the primary battle is the church (Church) vs. the world. Mrs. Franken didn't dream that up. The times are changing. Woe and woe and woe. 

I'm guessing the dark spiritual vision that creates the context of the poem may well be what she thought she might see by, well, now--the turn of the 21st century, a world, to her, unimaginable. Our world. Arie Franken, her husband, came to this ground as a babe in arms in a covered wagon. First place was a sod house. By 1962, she'd seen horses disappear and cars and trucks and planes shrink time and space into a moment. 

Against these powers of sin arrayed,
Strong we must stand, and unafraid.
Dare to defy this wicked world;
And let truth's banner be unfurled.
Be ever watchful, lest their snares
Be set within us, unawares.

The world's wickedness takes no prisoners. All we can do is stand our ground in vigilance lest it somehow seize us unaware. Life's great pitched battle is between us and them. 

If this sermon was penned in the depths of the Depression, Mrs. Franken might well have seen neighbors, in tears, abandoning farms and heading west to find some way to live. Made no sense to keep livestock. Just down the road, farmers threatening judges, the law. Her Dakota cousins claimed creation itself was returning to dust.

Still, the foe she's facing is even more dangerous because it's spiritual. 

The Church on earth a pilgrim band
From every clime and tongue and land,
Redeemed by wondrous sovereign grace,
Must occupy a separate place. 
Must walk in all the do and say
Upon the straight and narrow way.

That's what she's after here--"a separate place."

More tomorrow.
___________________ 
*Mrs. Arie Franken, "A Separate People," from The Volksvriend (?), date unknown.

Where have all the flowers gone?

There is not one blade of grass.

There is not one color in the world,

That is not intended to make us rejoice.

He did well, I thought. I'll admit I wasn't expecting much. We were in a tiny country church whose doorway the deceased, an 85-year-old woman with Alzheimer's, hadn't darkened for a decade at least. The preacher didn't know the woman really, nor did I. Still, truth be told, I'd give him an A-. Not reluctantly either. Okay, A maybe. 

Having read ten thousand essays makes me forever a critic. But then sermon evaluation is way of life for any full-blood Christian Reformed kid of my era. I grew up in a loving home where sermon critiques were Sunday fare; but the only roast on the table was baked with potatoes and onions. Preachers didn't get cooked at the Schaap house; my father was PK. But sermons were pulled apart, and if found overdone, declared so. What I'm saying is that I can't help myself. When I hear a sermon I evaluate. 

Yesterday, I thought the preacher was sound and personal and comforting, which is just about all that's required at a funeral. An old friend whose father was a preacher used to tell her that funerals were lovely things because all he had to do was read Psalm 90 and he'd have rapt attention. I suppose yesterday the bar was low.

I didn't know the woman who died, my wife's aunt. She lived a ways away, and the family wasn't all that close anymore. But it's hard not to notice a casket in front of the communion table. Still, had my heart been heavy with grief, like some were, I likely wouldn't have been so critical.

The woman's obit set out how she was the one in the family, the kids said, who made sure that they got to church, that they knew what they needed to for Sunday School and catechism, that kept their spiritual lives in line. Like most farm wives of her era, her kingdom was the home, which reportedly she kept, smilingly. What she loved more than anything, the kids had told the preacher, was flowers and birds.

So that's where he started. He admitted his thumb was anything but green. The only plant he had in his study, he said--he didn't know exactly what it was--was plainly dying. The sermon--it wasn't too long at all--took aim at life's fragility, how, like most of the wild flowers in our backyard, beauty was fleeting. See them there?--well, tomorrow they're gone. 

Nothing new there. But then I've read Psalm 90 a hundred times, but I still get knee-capped by "establish the work of our hands."

The sermon was not an unfamiliar tune. In ancient poetry it's called ubi sunt, I think, if I can remember my notes from English lit. "'Where have all the flowers gone?" some hippy trio used to sing. It's lament, and it's old and staid and serious; not frivolous, not silly. He didn't try to be cute. There's nothing cute about Psalm 90. 

"Our flowers are only flowers"--that's it really. That's a line Edgar Allen Poe, but it was, for the most part, the basis of his sincere and gracious homily, and, as I've already said, it was good and right and fitting.

But I've been toying around with Calvin lately (that's not meant as oxymoron), and I've become convinced that somehow my own Calvinist education cheated me out of respect for JC's marvelous sense of the eternal beauty of this world. Sometimes, I swear, I think Calvin was Lakota or Navajo because flowers aren't just flowers in Calvin. See those lines at the top of the page?--that's him sort of, maybe a bit of a Schaap turn, but just about pure Calvin. 

Those flowers, the heavens above, the farmland all around getting ready for harvest, the hills and mountains, lakes and plains--they're not just object lessons. They're not gods, as the Yankton Sioux who once lived here beneath my feet might regard them, but neither is this world a flannelgraph. Calvin thinks they're so much God that only in their presence, only in our natural world, do we come to know, for sure, that he is God and we, for sure, are not. In flowers we come to see just exactly how much we need him.

How about this? 

Nothing is so obscure or contemptible. 

even in the smallest corners of the earth, 

that it cannot display some of the marks and the wisdom of God. 

Might have been Sitting Bull, but that's Calvin. 

What that preacher said at the funeral wasn't unbiblical (my spellcheck doesn't know what to do with that word). Not at all. "Consider the lilly," "the birds of the field. . ." You know. "Dust to dust"--it's all there. I'm saying he didn't breathe a word of heresy.

But I couldn't help wonder whether that farm woman who tended flowers out there in the yard all her life long didn't see more, even in those early-bloomin' hollyhocks, than ubi sunt. I can't imagine she thought of them as symbols.  

A rose is a rose is a rose, I wanted to tell him.

Don't get me wrong. It was a very fine funeral, and all around the front of the sanctuary stood beautiful flowers. 

This morning, my morning thanks is for having been there, at a funeral with more family than friends at a little country church in a world, by the way, radiant and gold with harvest.

Still the one

Look, the only Republican politician to come out of the last night's heavyweight match in worse shape than the Orange Julius was Ted Cruz. You know, "Lyin'  Ted," whose father, "some people say," could well have been complicit in the assassination of JFK, and whose wife is--well, you've seen her. Lyin' Ted caved last week and said he'd vote for his favorite narcissist liar (Ted's words) because the Donald added Sen. Mike Lee to his top ten Supreme Court nominees. Oh, yeah, there may have been other reasons, like his own political hide. 

But I bet Ted Cruz is kicking himself this morning. He got on a bandwagon all right. Last night, the Donald snarfed and whoofed and sucked water, he bilged and blathered and looked at everybody else on stage as if they were bunny dung. He really proved himself trustworthy, didn't he?--really proved himself the wise statesman the world could depend on. 

He came apart at the seams. 

He was a disaster. He scored on Hillary in the early moments, when Kellyanne's leash was still visible; but once things got rolling, once the real Donald started belly-aching, it wasn't pretty, even if you dislike him. He didn't so much leave the tracks as outright crashed and burned.

Gov. Romney beat up Pres. Obama in the first of the debates last time around. For reasons I don't think anyone really knows, Obama stood up there and got carpet-bombed for 90 long minutes. He got outthought, outshoved, out-ed as an idiot, made Romney look invincible. But he came back in rounds 2 and 3 to fight again. And win. Debates and election.

Maybe Donald's got it in him too. I don't know. But last night, after a half hour, he could just as well have gone off to one of his lush retreats to twitter in his responses. He'd have done better. 

By the end he was a sorry, snotty mess, out of control, full of billowing bluster, never more than when he insisted with characteristic arrogance than what made him the best candidate was his character: "I have much better judgment than she does. There’s no question about that. I also have a much better temperament than she has, you know?"

Hillary didn't need to say a thing right then, and didn't. 

Trump was a big orange bottle rocket. He couldn't have done worse. 

I don't know that it will make any difference. Something close to half of this country thinks Hillary is the dragon and Donald is St. John of the Cross. Nothing's going to change. 

Nationally, each of them can only hope that the tens of millions of independents who now pledge allegiance to the Jill Stein or Gary Johnson tell themselves that neither of those candidates will be inaugurated in January. If they want to have a vote in who does, they'll have to go with one of the two most hated candidates for President in the history of the United States of America.

How did we get ourselves into this anyway? Seriously. 

What happened last night was not a match in any sense of the word. One candidate blew himself out of the water.

But to many, I'm sure, Donald Trump is still the Savior. Make that savior.

Corn Corners

It was, at the time, just another feature of northwest Iowa culture, I thought, like talk about "a hundred weight," open gilts, and an endless list of the cattle coming up on the sale barn floor on Friday. "Corn corners," they were called, a feature of rural life out here I had to get used to, in talk that to me felt a little paranoid, like my father forever arranging toilet paper strips over the public thrones his little boy's heinie had to visit on vacation. 

My mother-in-law gave corn corners frequent reference in not-so-subtle warnings. She didn't like 'em, even snarled about money-grubbin' farmers who didn't give a hoot for neighbors who planted crops as far up to gravel road corners as they could. 

On the other hand, if you left a goodly space at the very edge, sort of like this--

you were a good farmer and a good man. In a region as thoroughly Calvinist is this, being a good neighbor was not only nice but biblical. 

She gave warning several times before the whole story came out, how once upon a time years ago at the corner just east of the house, two cars, midday, had come roaring into an intersection. Neither suspected the other was coming. Neither slowed. Neither had any sense that pieces of both of those cars would never be put together again.

I knew the name of one of the drivers because his father was a neighbor. But little more than that. 

Here's what the paper said. "A 22-year old soldier, Gerald L. Bajema, of Orange City, is in critical condition at the Grossmann Hospital this morning (10:30 Wednesday) as a result of a collision northeast of Orange City Tuesday afternoon." The parenthesis are ominous, suggesting things could change, as they certainly did. 

If you're wondering, I'm quoting the Alton Democrat of June 3, 1955, and the article says the two other boys, the ones in the other car, "are listed as fair." 

That awful crash occurred at a nameless intersection of in the heart of Sioux County farmland, just down the road from the place my wife once called home. And it happened in June, when the corn could not have been much taller than ankle-deep. 

The Democrat describes what happened with almost childlike innocence: "The accident occurred 3 miles north, and 2 miles east of Orange City, at a wide open intersection; the result of two cars arriving at one spot at one time." It's a phenomenon country people here know bloody well.  

No paper today would say what the Alton Democrat reported in June of 1955. "Bajema's skull is fractured," it says, and then colors in the scene with details that make the horror more vivid. "Bajema was driving a 1950 Studebaker convertible," the Democrat says and reports that he was home on furlough. It was 1955. By the time the paper sent out the news, most of the community knew it all anyway, I'm sure. 

"Ironically, he was less than a half mile from home at the ill- fated intersection." More irony, more sadness: the boys in the other car "had also almost reached their destination at that point." That's the story.

My father-in-law tells me he saw it happen. He's 97 years old today, and says he remembers being out on the yard, even remembers seeing both cars coming, seemingly oblivious. 

My wife, who was seven years old, remembers the sound, as I'm sure her mother did. Her mother died a decade ago now, but it was her mother who brought up "corn corners" in early October, in a refrain I once thought risked obsession. She'd remind her daughter when her daughter and I would come back to Iowa from Arizona. She'd say, "You tell Jim to mind the corn corners," because she knew I wasn't a native, and she knew I hadn't heard the sound of that deadly accident. "You remind him," she'd say because I was a foreigner.

The boy of Bajema, a soldier on leave, died sometime after 10:30 on Wednesday, but the sound of that crash is something that stayed very much alive in the minds of my in-laws. 

We live close now and sometimes return home through an intersection a mile east of the spot where Gerald Leroy Bajema died in that Studebaker convertible one sunny June afternoon. Honestly, I can't help but resent the farmer whose crops are out there so close to the scene of all that horror and thoughtlessly close to the road because he left a corn corner right there a mile from where Bajema was killed, planted his damned crop all the way to the edge of the intersection, leaving people blind to what's coming.

I went there yesterday with a camera because I wanted to document the guy's lust for Iowa gold. I wanted to write something about how quickly we forget, about how some extra bucks for a bushel of corn, at most, seemed wicked. 

But the guy had cut his corn back, scalped things right where they should be. I'm not kidding. I should have taken a picture.

I don't know why he did it--it's not yet time to harvest. He may well have been simply cutting silage, like many farmers do just about now. Maybe he cut back the corn corner for strictly economic reasons. I don't know if he knows a story that happened just a mile west 61 years ago and left a mark on families all around. He's younger, not old enough to have heard the crash. 

But I'll tell you what I'd like to think. I'd like to think that maybe his mother remembered early June of 1955. And if she's too young, maybe his grandma was the one who didn't forget. I'd like to think that someone remembered. 

It's safer now, that corner. Maybe what was there is just so much silage, but I'd like to think there's more to those stubble stalks. I'd like to think that someone remembered. 

That's what I'd really love to think. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Wrath

“Who knows the power of your anger?

For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.”

Psalm 90:11

I’m going to go to make a generalization I’ve no right to. Here it is. One of the good things about aging is that, through the years, we simply grow less angry—Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Grumpy Old Men notwithstanding. Old bucks like me have less testosterone, less dignity to protect, less turf to maintain, and therefore fewer reasons to boil over.

Hairlines aren’t the only thing to recede, so does quarrelsomeness. Aging means fewer people notice us. There’s just plain fewer risks. That reality doesn’t make you mad, just bad-tempered. Being peevish isn’t necessarily being wrathful.

Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Last night I was mad. Last night, I used language I shouldn’t have, even to my daughter, who didn’t have it coming, who had nothing to do with why I was boiling over. Last night—memorably, I might add—this old guy was spitting fire.

This morning I could still throw flames; in fact, I just sent out an e-mail I probably shouldn’t have. But I’ve calmed down a bit now, a bit; and thinking about that rare chunk of rage at arm’s length this morning is helpful when reading this strange verse from Psalm 90: “Who knows the power of your anger? For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.”

It’s helpful because normally it’s easy for me to be embarrassed by the OT’s occasionally draconian Jehovah. I find it hard to know that hellfire God, maybe in part because at my age I don’t know all that much anymore about rage myself. Wrath may be one of the seven deadlies, but it’s not one I spent all much time repenting. I’m too old.

           

Not last night. The provocation, basically, was injured pride—I was convinced that certain people didn’t respect me. That explanation is half truth. What blew my cork was that I didn’t get my way. We’d worked our duffs off, but the whole project shipwrecked because someone in authority thought maybe someone else might be hurt. Honestly, the whole story is not worth a story.*

But my wrath is worth a story when I think about this line from the venerable 90^th Psalm. Here’s what I’m thinking: maybe the OT God isn’t a far cry from who I am. If I read the whole Exodus narrative, it seems that what God wants more than anything is not to be an also-ran. In the panoply of gods running kingdoms in the Fertile Crescent, he doesn’t want to be just another graven image.

“Who should I say this God is?” Moses—the writer here—asks of this God.

“I am the always,” he says.

End of story.

And when people create golden calves of whatever size and extremity—this God, Jehovah, spits and fumes and, sad to say, often enough people die. He’s like me that way. Sort of. But nobody died last night, I’m happy to say.

           

Oddly enough, I wonder if I don’t think of God as human enough. If I were him and people didn’t really give me the dignity I’d deserved, I’d be mad—like I was last night. Maybe all that anger—it’s behind me now—maybe even all that blasted wrath is helpful. You think you got dissed?—just think of Him. And it happens on a daily basis, too. Shoot, hourly.

           

That’s more than a little scary. And that’s only half of it, this verse says. That’s not even the whole story. Your wrath is everything we can imagine, Lord—that’s what Moses says.

And then some.

And a great deal more.

Voter fraud

If Donald Trump is right, and his disciples stand guard at the polls to make sure nobody votes twice or three times or thirty, and if Rep. John Lewis is right in asking President Obama to send out thousands of federal election observers to make sure things go well, think of the size of the gathering outside the voting booth. Could be dozens out there watching.

Trump thinks the thing is rigged, although he hasn't been saying that lately, at least not as often or as loud. "Folks, the whole system is rigged," he'd say in the olden days. You remember.

That's why he told his people to hang around the polls and make sure none of those frauds sneak in a half-dozen times. If good people don't take the law into their own hands these days, you know what'll happen. 

Yes, we do.

You heard him say it. "The whole thing is rigged." His trainer has him on a leash now, looking more presidential. But if you ask, he'll still say it: "Get out there and supervise, you second-amendment people." You know Trump.

Now Rep. John Lewis, who marched in Selma a lifetime ago, is asking Obama to send election observers out because he doesn't trust the polls either, for opposite reasons. He's sure there'll be intimidation, sure some potential voters will be sent away without having filled out a ballot, as is their right. He may well be afraid of Donald's disciples. 

Now we got a situation. Of course 

There Are Nearly 300 Cases of Voter Fraud in America

or so said the headline in a right-wing website last year. 300. That's right. Think of it this way: if I gave you a bowl of Skittles, and 300 of them were bad, would you still count the Skittles? You know.

Amazing, isn't it? Amazingly silly. Real-live studies show voter and voting fraud is almost non-existent. 

No matter. Donald says the whole thing is rigged, even though conservatives have been rewriting suffrage laws to make sure those 300(!!) cases don't surface again.  The purpose of all that legislation is to counter all that voter fraud. 

No matter, I guess. Still rigged, Donald says.

Last week I watched forty-some brand new citizens swear allegiance to the United States of America. Never before had I witnessed a real naturalization event. The American Legion marched in the colors, opening remarks were given, four politicians sent staff to read their congratulations. 

Then a silver-haired woman sang a medley of patriotic hymns--"America the Beautiful," "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," a chorus or two of some old faves like "Yankee Doodle Dandy." She had a great voice, walked among those brand new citizens as if wooing them.  National anthem too.

Finally, the presiding judge, in his robe, delivered a bit of a homily and had all forty stand, raise their right hands and solemnly swear allegiance to the United States of America, which they did. Many had family standing and watching.

I couldn't help noticing that only one of the new citizens was white--from Eastern Europe. The rest--all of them--were people of color: African, Mexican, Central and South American. 

When it was over, the judge sent them all to a voter registration table set up just outside the room, where they formed a line. 

I doubt President Obama will do anything with Rep. John Lewis's request, but when I think about what I watched just last week, I can't help thinking, like Mr. Lewis, that maybe, come November, we'll need more people at the polls. 

The plague of the biting midge

By nature and conviction, I swear I'm not paranoid, and certainly not subject to insane conspiracy theories. I tend to believe in experts and expert opinion, but on this one nobody freaking knows. Go ahead--do the research. Look for yourself. 

Right now the real terrorists in the neighborhood aren't religious or fanatic. They're a mite-sized bug so small you don't have a clue they're on you until you feel a needle of pain. Then you look and see nothing. The pain gets worse, and then there's another on your ankle, and you're wondering what kind of Twilight Zone you've stepped into. You stop what you're doing and look close, and then--and only then--do you see this itsy-bitsy beast, and only when you look really, really close. They're awful, and they're everywhere. They slip into the house as if a screen is a joke. They're on this page, for pity sake.

Two days ago, after two weeks away, I was looking forward to working outside, ripping out twisted tomato plants that still haven't worn out even though we have. There was a jungle out there, but it was a perfectly sweet late summer afternoon and would've been a great day if I hadn't spent more time whacking an invasion of irritation than I did deconstructing plants. I went inside, put on a bigger shirt--that helped, but I would have had to don something from a Hazmat locker to escape 'em.  

Yesterday, same thing, same time, same station. I lasted twenty minutes before I threw in the towel.

Yesterday my wife went to town and claimed she heard all kinds of people cuss about those tiny little insects.  "They're awful. What are they anyway?" I'd begun to regard them as the kind of curse arranged for country people only. Nope. They're townies, too. The whole region's besieged. 

Truth be known, I'm starting to think no one knows what they are, and the reason is simple. My armchair research says that they're some nameless branch of the fly family, from the Order Diptera in the family Ceratopogonidae, a definition which does nothing to quell my outrage. Here's the real bottom line--there are at least 4000 species of these terrifying tikes, which means that your guess is as good as mine or Dr. Insector Inspector down at the state u. I swear I'd nail it all down, but I can barely see the dumb things. 

Call 'em what you want. Everybody else does. "Biting midge," one website says, is a common name, but here in North America (they're everywhere, they're everywhere) people frequently call them “no-see-ums,” which isn't bad but feels sort of gracious to me, given that they chased me indoors for two afternoons straight. People in the northeast call them “punkies." They aren't. They're the real darn thing. 

My friends in the southwest call them "pinyon gnats," which suggests that they terrorize people out gathering nuts, which is sad. Down south, they're “five-O’s" because they don't start their assault until late afternoon (Reb insects are lazier than Yankees), and Canadians call them “moose flies." Canadians are a hoot, aren't they? Talk about oxymoronic.

Tell you what, I'll just call 'em a plague and hope their shelf life is two or three days because I'd like to get back outside without dressing as if I'm from the bomb squad. 

Seriously, they're everywhere. Yesterday I had a meeting, sort of, downtown. We arrived a little early, had to stand outside until the chair arrived. Guess what? In no time at all we were slapping at invisible enemies. There they were AT CITY HALL.

Pharaoh must have been insanely stubborn. This plague we're in is something awful. I'd have let those people go.

From the Homestead (10)--Mystery and Miracle

The story goes that a man named John H. MacColl suffered mountain fever after coming west to Nebraska for his health, of all things. Wasn't just a set back either; inside of a day or two he was unable to move from the waist down, fully paralyzed. Somehow, he made  it to Fort McPherson, forty miles away, to see the post surgeon, who, after those visits, simply told Mr. MacColl that there was nothing he could do. 

Here's where the story gets going, the incredible complication of the old story. A traditional medicine man just happened along, or so the story goes, and somehow--the two of them not sharing a language--managed to explain to the bed-ridden MacColl that, if MacColl truly believed him, the old medicine man could heal him up good. 

Keep in mind that John H. MacColl had absolutely no choice at this point. Out there in the middle of nowhere, his life's prospects weren't exactly soaring, so he signed in for the treatment. 

The next day the medicine man brought along an interpreter to make clear what he'd  try to say the day before--that he could heal MacColl if MacColl would submit to the treatment he was offering. Once more, MacColl agreed. 

What's to come here isn't pretty, but then, I imagine, neither was MacColl's paralysis. 

The medic took a saw-tooth knife out of his pocket and began making a whole series of open cuts into MacColl's buck naked body, a hundred of them, or so the story goes. What it was, MacColl never really knew, but the medic took some kind of herb or something from a pouch and started to chew it as if it were tobacco. 

That munching accomplished, he spit something of whatever he was chewing into his fingers and proceeded to rub it into each of those hundred cuts.

That was the promised treatment. That was all of it. Trust me, I'm not swearing by any of this.

In three days, Laura MacColl says--John's sister--her brother could actually stand alone. A week later, he could walk.

Lots of talk about miracles as of late, the Vatican having substantially proven two of them attributed to Mother Teresa, the requirement for Roman Catholic sainthood. In a recent New York Times op ed, Jacalyn Duffin recounts a story for which she was subpoenaed to testify, the case of a woman so far gone with cancer that there was no question she'd begun the inevitable march to her demise. 

Not so. Months later--years later--the patient was still alive. Jacalyn Duffin was asked to testify, even though the hearing was ecclesiastical and Duffin an atheist. She was asked because the church wanted to know whether what happened was or was not a miracle from the likes of her, a physician of repute who's actually a certified atheist. Duffin says she made very clear that there was no scientific reason for the patient's still being alive. Here's Ms. Duffin's final paragraph.

Respect for our religious patients demands understanding and tolerance; their beliefs are as true for them as the “facts” may be for physicians. Now almost 40 years later, that mystery woman is still alive and I still cannot explain why. Along with the Vatican, she calls it a miracle. Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump her belief? However they are interpreted, miracles exist, because that is how they are lived in our world.

So don't ask me about John H. MacConn. The whole story could be a fib or a myth or sheer happenstance. Maybe John H. simply had a bad case of gas and it passed--I don't know, and no one ever will.

As Ms. Duffin the unbeliever says, "Why should my inability to offer an explanation trump" the MacConn story? 

I'll just shake my head and let it be. 

Shootout

At least the shootout at OK Corral ended. Guns were drawn, shots were fired, and some of the tough hombres went down and didn't get up. Blasted cowboys got theirs at the quick hands of the Earps, who had enlisted Doc Holiday as a ringer. Ended the feud just like that.

The good guys walked away. The shootout at OK Corral, Tombstone, AZ, way back in 1881 may well remain the most important showdown in western American history; and it wasn't going to be repeated because Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers never got up off the dirt again.

Not so next week. The only matter beyond speculation is that both hombres will live to duel again--twice, in fact. There'll be two more debates after next week's, no matter how much blood is left on the stage or whose it is in a pool. The whole darn world expects Hillary the wonk to try to bring the Donald to his knees with facts and figures and specifics. If she wins, it'll be because she's a vastly better engineer. She'll kill him with competency.

Donald takes no prisoners and only punches below the belt. Hillary will be getting into the ring with a animal armed with chain saw. Unless his incredible manager has his ears and tongue pinned, all you can expect is the unexpected. He's amoral, knows no boundaries. It'll be the engineer versus the cave man, and nobody--nobody!--knows who'll step out of that ring the winner.

Besides, it's completely unlikely that anyone anywhere close to that ring will come away with a changed mind. The whole blasted shootout is being staged for the hearts and minds of but a sliver of uncommitted voters. The insane hate for both combatants is so high that each of the candidates will hold on to the vast majority of their supporters but convert no one. Trump was right when he announced just down the road (at the college where I was employed for most of my life) that he could kill a man on Broadway and still be loved by loyalists. Millions of America would rather elect Satan.

But then, for millions, Hillary is Satan. That's where we are.

Whoever gains the victory next Monday night, or come November, will face four more years of bloody warfare. The truth is, there are so many checks and balances written into American democratic system that it's virtually impossible for any one man or woman to lead all the rest of us into some kind of spiritual or physical Armageddon. Even Trump can't trump Congress and the Supreme Court all. the. time. Hillary, singlehandedly, can't flip America suddenly third world.

No matter who gets up slowly a week from now on Tuesday morning, no matter who Fox News or CNN or anybody else declares winner, the madness will go on.

And on. And on. And on. Neither of them, all by their lonesomes, will lead America to ruin. Only the rest of us can do that.

The only casualty will be the body politic, and we've been staggering around with a gut shot for a long, long time. 

You can't help but wish Wyatt Earp were in the race. That whole shootout only lasted thirty seconds.

Sunday Morning Meds--"We fly away"

“The length of our days is seventy years—

or eighty, if we have the strength; 

yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, 

for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”  Psalm 90:9

Geraldine Brooks’s novel March recounts the harrowing Civil War testimony of Mr. March, a character notably absent from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, the father of the girls at the heart of that novel.  Brooks used Alcott’s own father as a prototype, the legendary New England transcendental idealist Bronson Alcott.

           

March’s abolitionist views prompt him to enlist into the Union army as a chaplain, but war is never kind on idealists. By the end of his testimony, he’s dying.

His wife, Marmee, who, throughout her life, has known little more (or less) than the comforts of small-town New England patrician culture, finds her disease-stricken husband amid the horrors of a Civil War hospital, where he’s near death.

At one point in the novel, Marmee, who is searching for a black nurse, walks into a hospital laundry, and finds herself suddenly in a “dead house,” surrounded by mutilated naked bodies of Civil War soldiers. There she finds “an elderly negress,” washing the “abbreviated body” of a double amputee, “singing as she worked, which struck me as unseemly until I realized what she sang was a hymn.” In the billowing clouds of steam from the laundry, Marmee says that woman appeared to be “a large black angel serenading the men to heaven.”

I know the song, even though Geraldine Brooks doesn’t give a title. I’m guessing it’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” If it isn’t, it’s another from that memorable book of Negro spirituals, because, well, what else could it be?—a black woman, born a slave, doing a job no white folks want in the bowels of dreaded darkness.

Brooks doesn’t give the hymn a title because in all likelihood, Mrs. March, an early feminist, an affluent white, educated woman from New England, simply doesn’t know that music, not from the soul  To be truthful, neither do I, not from the soul.

Confession:  I don’t know the suffering required to create Negro spirituals. I don’t know the horror that would prompt human beings to beg deliverance so desperately  from life itself. I have never known oppression, only freedom. I’ve not watched people die when it wasn’t their time. I haven’t buried a child. I’ve lived a good, good life.

And that’s why, in part, I’ve never known the despair required to utter a verse like this one:  “The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”

I’ve never known life to be so pitiable a master as to turn my face toward death, but I know what Mrs. March senses when she walks in that dead house and hears the music. She’s beginning to sense that others certainly have.

The Bible is a big book.  There’s room for far more than me and Marmee in its loving grasp. When I consider a verse like this one, I’m struck by two things: first, thanksgiving—how blessed I’ve been not to have known so much suffering; and second, fear—how just because I haven’t doesn’t mean I won’t. 

I’m thankful for Negro spirituals and Psalm 90, not because I can identify, because I can’t. I’m thankful for hymns like “Swing Lo, Sweet Chariot” and “I Fly Away” because those old songs teach me—teach us—about both heaven and earth.   

From the Homestead (9)--love in granite

In the barest of outlines, their coupling seems, at best, a marriage of convenience. The husband, Daniel Freeman, way out on the cusp of the frontier, hunting buffalo and fighting hostiles, is lonely, wants some relief of at least part of the high drama his life has handed him for years, throughout the Civil War, when he worked as a Northern spy. These days, despite the wild life, he’s flat out lonely. He’s got land. He’s got a place. He needs a wife.

So he asks a woman who seems convenient, Agnes Suiter, a schoolteacher back in Iowa. He knows her very well. She’d been engaged to his brother James, who, most sadly, didn’t return from the Civil War. Early in their correspondence, she addresses him as "Brother Dan." but then already with the next letter, she starts things differently: “Dear Friend Daniel.” A subtle change, but a change nonetheless.

It's easy to judge their coupling as loveless, too easy in fact. Daniel was a divorcee, and Agnes considered herself something of a widow. Given their lives' circumstances, both seemed destined to loneliness; both recognized that future, however, and opted for the alternative. Why not? Better than living alone, each might well have thought.

Letters are exchanged, little more than a year passes, and they marry, thereby ending their loneliness. Agnes bears Samuel seven children, suggesting their relationship could not have been bereft of passion, although on the mid-19^th century frontier, a passle of kids doesn't necessarily connote love or even intimacy.

Maybe it's their shared gravestone up the hill at the National Homesteading Monument that suggests something cold, something merely convenient. I don’t know why. By most accounts, Daniel wasn’t an easy man to love, and Agnes Suiter was a entire generation younger, 17 years. Could they have loved each other?

And there’s the strange fact of their meager correspondence doing all the heavy lifting. Daniel Freeman wrote her first sometime in 1863 (that letter is lost); the two of them were married in her parents’ home in Iowa in February of 1865. Barely a dozen letters, but it didn't even take that many before promises were offered.

Maybe it seems like pure convenience when you consider photographs of actual homesteaders. You’ve seen those homely pictures a hundred times--sun-scorched cheeks, greasy hands, stiff-with-dust work clothes on sober folks in front of a sod house. Why would a young educated lady come out to frontier Nebraska for homesteader 17 years her elder?

I wonder if the letters themselves may document an answer. Pioneers like Freeman are characteristically incapable of expressing feelings, if in fact they have them at all. But it's Daniel who brings up the pain he felt at the death of his brother and her fiance’. “. . .the caus of my writing to you on the 4^th I was thinking of James no one can tell my feelings unless they hav lost an only Brother,” he tells her in his own bungled style; and then, “Before his death I never was lonsom or homesick no difernce where I was But now I am lonsom wheather in company or alone in a city or on the Planes.” (His burden, his urgency, seems heightened by all those scrambled spellings, doesn't it?)

He writes her because he's been thinking about James's death. “I always got leters from him and that was the caus of my writing to you thinking you might write a friendly leter in return—“

When she writes back, she follows suit with a confession rising from as close to her soul as her heart can be. "Tis Sad to loose an only brother. I lost my only sister last Spring. She was young—had not attained to the age to share my joys and sorrows—and I know I feel lost without her.” 

She’s answering him directly, but not without some nuance, moving slowly and carefully into a dialogue he began, a discussion of hurt and the loss of the man she loved. "But when James died it was more than a friend,” she tells him. “It is strange how we learn to love some one person more than a brother or sister.” That's her underlining.

What she risks in that approach is minimizing the wound Samuel Freeman had revealed for her. "But Natures laws are such, and we can not avoid it. You know perhaps all the facts in the case. Theirfore I need not tell you that I loved James—your brother—more than any other person living or dead. He was indeed my first love and I often think that no one other can take his place in my affections. . .”

And then this warm and almost surprising qualifier—“at least that is the way I feel now.”

Her consciousness of Samuel’s reactions suggests an admiration, even the hint of something more. “Excuse me for telling you this if you did not wish to hear it,” she tells him.

I can't help thinking that's the beginning for them and of them. That’s how their relationship, by post, began. The honest emotions both offered each other in these opening letters were found by each of them to be of such great value that more, much more, begged to be requested. Confessing the depth of their mutual sadness opened something in both of them. It's what I'd like to think.

The names of Samuel and Agnes Freeman are carved in stone up on the monument hill. Both of them, I’m sure, were made of granite—they had to be to live life where they did and do it successfully and joyfully. 

But I can't help thinking that what the letters suggest about them is not the simply the monumental strength of their characters but the blessed tenderness of their love.

An odd couple, really. This nation’s very first homesteaders. Lovers, I’d like to think.

_______________________________

The letters of Samuel Freeman and Agnes Suiter are available at the National Homestead Monument’s website.