Morning Thanks--All is Calm

If I heard him once, I heard him tell the story a dozen times of how the family's attitude changed.

The story went like this. One of his early novels included a racy scene or two the relatives, his own kith and kin, found distasteful. And there were such.

His first homecoming after publication was not heartwarming. It was a bit chilly, but the family waited until Sunday dinner to open the discussion. "There are things you write in that book, Feik, of which we don't approve." Some aunt, maybe even his step-mother, lugged her disapproval into dinner because one simply doesn't not mention such grave offense.

They were eating, he says. No one looked up. No one spoke. All sipped their soup determinedly. The reproof son Feike received just then from the relatives was immediate, rapt silence, its own kind of excommunication.

If he tried to explain himself or legitimize the scenes they had determined to be off-color--well, let's be frank, indecent, dirty, and downright wicked--the novelist never talked about it. Perhaps he let well enough alone. His set-up moment for this favorite story of his was the profound silence that followed a Jeremiad delivered, as if on cue, around the Sunday dinner table by a woman.

That wasn't the end of the story. Later that afternoon, when it was time to milk, Fred Manfred claimed he went out to the barn with the rest of the men (he was the oldest of the Feikema boys--six in all). Once they were they were milking, the novel came up once more. "You know, Feik, my favorite part was right there on page 105, you know, where the guy. . ."

Frederick Manfred loved that story, even used it as a foreward to a later novel, loved it not only because he lived it but because it legitimized his sometimes graphic descriptions. Women may have hated all of that, but men?--they liked it. Even read over the hot spots.

That story isn't as funny as it once was. Manfred wasn't wrong in telling it. It wasn't, at base, evil. Today, a century later, gender differences still exist. I didn't mind skipping the baby shower down in Oklahoma when my wife and daughter went.

But the plague of men behaving badly is not only embarrassing, it's unnerving if you're male. Once in a while some female teacher gets fired for dallying with her male students. It's men who perform the madness, men who are out of control, men who belittle, who strike fear, who abuse again and again and again. Men are the villians, the sick-os.

A couple weeks ago now, a choral group--all men--performed a piece of musical theater that was beautiful, not simply because of the virtuosity of their performance or the poignant story they told, but also because it offered me--and other men--a moving, blessed picture of men behaving well.

All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914 was, for me at least, a bromide of gender therapy. What happened in the trenches at Christmas, Germans and the Brits celebrating Christmas together, featured more than its share of drinking and smoking and carrying on; but for a moment at least, it threw the spotlight on men putting war behind them, even if only for a day.

Instead of shooting, they sang carols. Instead of machine guns, they brought out the grog. Instead of killing, they helped each other bury their dead. Instead of death, they chose life.

All is Calm was, for this male, a Christmas gift for which I'm greatly thankful. If, when the curtain went down, those nine men had said they were going to do the whole show over again, I'd have sat back down in a heartbeat. It was great theater, awesome music, and, in a world of men behaving badly, a reminder that it doesn't have to be that way.