Sunday Morning Meds--Songs in the Night

“I remembered my songs in the night.” Psalm 77 

We were standing in an old country church in South Dakota—stamped tin ceilings ancient oak pews. Once upon a time two wings had been added on either side for extra seating. The carpet was new, the paint fresh, but the place was old for white-settler South Dakota, 130 years. No matter how diligently the people kept it up, this house of worship showed its age.

My immigrant great-grandparents once walked, weekly, through the same front doors, then sat, five kids with them, beneath the same tin ceilings. I have a history in this old church—that’s what I was thinking. I may well have been the first great-grandchild ever to darken the front door, but some particle of me was once here some generations ago.

We’d just come from a long day along the Missouri River—some hiking, some sight-seeing on the valley’s big and gorgeous shoulders--before stopping at a woebegone country church in a town well down the road toward dying. It was early June, the sun radiant, the emerald land we’d been driving through quite empty of distraction and therefore, honestly, full of God.

An old psalm hymn bubbled up in my soul from somewhere in my childhood. I never considered it a favorite, hadn’t thought about it for years or sung it for decades. Long ago it was chased from the hymnal by more peppy stuff, but somehow it seemed apt for time and circumstance.

So I asked our guests whether they remembered “To the Hills I Lift My Eyes” from an old psalter. Average age got 50-cent coffee at McDonalds. They nodded politely, enough of an assent; besides I was not to be denied. I grabbed a pitch out of nowhere, and soon they were all with me because the first few lines hadn’t left anyone’s memory and the melody is simple. We pieced together the lyrics because some of us knew enough that all of us found a path through.

The bright sun outside created mid-summer heat and not a whisper of night, but I remembered Asaph’s voice in Psalm 77—“I remembered my songs in the night.” Even today, that line reminds me of that moment in that old church, and the blessedness of connecting with something greater than me or us or any of our individual stories, something ethereal that can only be carried in music. Beatitude in such unreasonable things is sometimes perfectly palpable.

One of the comforts of faith begins in our fulsome sense of our belonging—we are not alone because we know whose we are. “So, my brothers,” Paul says, heavy on the brothers, “you also died to the law through the body of Christ.” And why? “. . .so that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead.” But there’s more: “. . .that we might bear fruit to God.”

Sometimes that fruit is emerges most fully in music, even in an old dying church in the middle of nowhere, a place set gloriously in God’s world, the God to whom we belong.

All that beauty reminded me as it does us, brothers and sisters, now through Lent, that once—and always--there was, and is, joy.

Christ became a slave

Literature is, in a strict etymological sense of the word, subversive. It wants you to think about something in a way that you would not otherwise. The same is true of poetry. And sometimes people who subscribe to goodness in a programmatic way are resistant to surprise. Christianity is subversive in that sense. Christ became a slave. That undercuts cultural assumptions about what is valuable, what the hierarchies are. Art reproduces that great overturning whenever it’s good art.

That's Marilynne Robinson in Christian Century, in a dialogue with Rowan Williams. I can't help but think she's right. To say what she does bluntly would, I'm sure, get her in great trouble with the radical right, who know the Truth about most everything, which, in turn, makes screaming about what you believe not only your mission but your heartfelt joy.

They're all around us these days. Next week, Marilynne Robinson will be speaking at Dordt College. They're not happy about that because she's not orthodox enough, which means that Dordt College has, on its own, gone over to the darkness. Follow the path of their reasoning:

Tidbit from our talk Monday night... There was agreement from the defenders of Dordt that Marilynne Robinson would not be allowed to be hired as faculty at Dordt. There was no debate whether she stands firmly against basic biblical teaching on marriage. 

Yet a handful still think she should be allowed to speak. 

That drew the question... what would someone have to say in order to not be allowed to speak at Dordt? 

The defender of Dordt had no response. 

Shouldn't our Christian colleges have standards?

Your answer please. 

Yes, Christian colleges should have standards--in which case, presumably, Marilynne Robinson should be turned away at the Fourth Street entrance or at least not be given a podium. Or No, Christian colleges shouldn't have standards, which is what the writer is suggesting anyway. Nice either/or fallacy.

Apparently, what would please the screamers is a schedule of speakers who stand firm on the principles the screamers believe to be Truth. They know the Truth, and they'll be happy to wield it. 

"Literature is," Ms. Robinson says in the interview, "in a strict etymological sense of the word, subversive," which she defines this way: "It wants you to think about something in a way that you would not otherwise."

That's wholesale abomination to the screamers.

But then, Robinson says, "Christianity is subversive. . .Christ became a slave." In so doing he undercut the rule and the power of the Pharisees, who also claimed to know the whole Truth too.

In the late 1980s, I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a horrifying futuristic fable about what might happen if the government owned women's bodies. The scenario Ms. Atwood created, I thought, was beyond belief. She was far, far too tough on evangelical Christians, I thought, making them out to be something akin to Hitler's henchmen. 

But today when I read the screamers, I can't help thinking Margaret Atwood wasn't far afield. If the screamers had their way, campus cops would man the entrances, demanding, Gestapo-like, their particular brand of orthodoxy of every soul who enters.

We've been reading Eugene Peterson lately: "A typical reaction to discovering there is widespread evil in the world is to want to get out your broom and sweep the place clean," he says in a meditation in Every Step an Arrival. "Righteous indignation blazes in the heart. Adrenaline flows into the bloodstream. Something has to be done. But the dangers that stem from the action need to be spelled out."

And then this sentence, not easy to take for someone from the Reformed tradition, as I am and Peterson was: "The most perilous action of the human being is the reforming action" because "there are no areas where it is easier to fall into a kind of devastating sin. . .arrogance/hate/self-righteous pride." 

Christ became a slave. That's a lesson for the screamers. 

And me too.

Morning Thanks--the ubiquitous Canada goose

You may have heard it on the street, but apparently it's true. Those Canada geese you see these days almost everywhere, they mate for life. Seriously. And their divorce rate is almost non-existent. Just about this time of year, couples break from the flock and look for a place for the kids. Anyone who lives around them knows it's not unusual for them to choose a spot brazenly out in the open. Sometimes, year after year, they do the whole family thing in the exact same place.

They're here now and in abundance. Yesterday, outside cleaning up the winter mess, I heard them for most of the afternoon as if no more than a wheelbarrow ride away. But they keep their distance. Even if they're along the river, they'll spot you the minute you shut the back door, then grouse a bit about that lousy humanoid across the field.

They're nice to have around, but I don't mind them keeping their distance. They litter with abandon, and their waste is more than droppings. Who hasn't walked among them in some city park and not tippy-toed through the muddy mess? 

They're unerringly old-fashioned. When the eggs appear, Mom only keeps the nest while Dad guards the operation, but never changes a diaper. They're fastidious parents. Our bald eagles have been known to kick kids out of the nest if they show no reluctance to leave; geese keep the kids around for a year, as if parting is, in fact, sweet sorrow.

But before you buy them MAGA hats, understand they greatly like Hillary's notion that "it takes a village." When goslings get to early adolescence, families often become flocks.

"Why are they called Canada geese?" our third-grade grandson asked us last week. It seems  nobody really knows; after all, they show up in every state of the union and don't necessarily make annual pilgrimages up north to watch hockey. They just are and have been since (so saith the OED) the early 18th century. 

If, at your peril, you overlook their fecal matter, they make good neighbors. Out back of our house, they meal on grains and what remains from last fall's harvest. They harm no one nor anything, and only rarely get in the way. 

However, they're known to be crabby, even hostile. I don't know anyone who's ever petted one, whether or not they're out with their children. They're just plain mean. And, no, they don't Twitter. Thank goodness.

In case you're wondering, they used to migrate more and farther than many do today. Even as far north as northwest Iowa, some families stay and homestead. Experts aren't sure of the origins of this new behavior, but it's meant an increase in population. Today, they number between four and six million--that's a ton of do-do. 

I hate to bring it up, but they're not particularly good singers. Right now, they're flying over the house, and I'm reminded again of what manner of blessing it is that human voices are not designed to honk. Can you imagine what a church council would sound like? A quarter mile away, and you'd still swear they were feeding just beyond the lot line.

It's nice to have them around, on the ground or in the air in their strict triangles. As long as I don't have to clean up their dirt, they're a blessing, a wonder. I'm thankful they're here.

Still, "good fences make good neighbors." Never more true.  

Morning Thanks--Wishful thinking

Some morning thanks ten years ago, a month from now. 

Thought I'd pull them up and dream a little. Today, temps could reach 70. Today, for the first time, I'll be outside to prove myself an man by doing some yard work; tomorrow, once again, I'll be reminded I'm an old man. 

Years ago, when we'd come to Iowa from deserts of Arizona, we'd be amazed at the azure world all around. 

On May 4, 2010, the world was so cartoonishly green, it was not to be believed. Seems impossible that, a month from now, it'll be so again.

Just a few weeks. All of this is coming to a theater near you. Don't miss it. 

Be awed all over again. It's Easter.

Book Review--Black Sunday by Benjamin Myers

Job's friends had his health in mind, but none of them, nor their arguments, could satisfy the emptiness in his soul. He'd lost everything, his family, his land, his enterprise, even his health in a tsunami of bad times unlike anything ever seen in this world. He numbered his days as "the worst hard times," which is also the title of Timothy Egan's masterful portrayal of an American time and a place we've commonly become to describe as "the Dust Bowl."

It's impossible to imagine thick black winds so strong they dented fenders, dunes so high they swallowed farm machinery, static electricity so severe people dared not to touch each other, storms so black that men, women, and children could get lost between house and barn. 

You can go back imaginatively by a shelf of vivid portrayals right there beside Egan's The Worst Hard Times. There's a masterful film by Ken Burns, a museum of photographs by masters like Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans. There's John Steinbeck and Sonora Babb's overlooked portrayal in Their Names are Unknown. 

But no one I know has done what Benjamin Myers, who teaches at Oklahoma Baptist University, has done with the Dust Bowl in a series of sonnets (of all things) that open up the lives of six characters he carefully chooses as a chorus out the high plans, all of them living through "the worst hard times." 

Suffering, oddly enough, can be beautiful in the hands of someone who sees more than meets the eye, and Myers does. Black Sunday is poetry, but when you close the book, you have to remind yourself that the world you were just in was verse--sonnets, in fact. For what Myers has done with these portrayals is bring us, heart and suffering soul, into our own humanness. See if you agree--

Will Lists His Assets on Another Loan Application

800 acres of itch, grit, and chirr
crawling with hoppers, burning like a match.
All mine. The foot deep drifts of dirt that were
my neighbor's field, mine too now, since I catch
with my strip lists the dirt he don't do much 
to keep. The tractor  with the rear wheels stuck
halfway in sand I owe your bank a bunch
on still and won't pay off unless my luck 
turns. But it won't. We shot the little herd. 
The truck is dead. Your bank has got the car.
The combine's broke. I guess I've got my word,
and next to that my other assets are
dirt sore eyes, overalls with one knee hole,
a body dressed in rags, a ragged soul. 

It's a masterful portrayal of Dust Bowl despair done by way of the kind of assessment we all do, formally and informally. Will Burns' list of assets is barely fourteen lines long, scribbled out in despair as real as sweeping the house out with a shovel. 

Is there hope here? I think yes, not because the clouds of Black Sunday hold some blessed silver lining, but because Will Burns ends his paltry list of assets not with something outside but something eternal within, his soul. Putting "his ragged soul" gives it most attention in a final line that is not so much a confession as it is David-like testimony. What comes before it is commodity; the last line reveals his eternal self, his destiny. 

And it's there, he says. It may be as ragged as his overalls, but his soul has not blown away. 

God himself does not speak in Benjamin Myers Black Sunday, certainly not the way he does to end the book of Job. Will Burns' losses don't tally the way Job's did. After all, Will still has a family. 

All of which is to say that Benjamin Myers' Black Sunday isn't the book of Job. But the times he describes and the folks whose intimate portrayals surface in this moving book of poems are most definitely kin. 

The Rhetoric of Steve King

Everybody says rural America is collapsing. But I keep going to places with more moral coherence and social commitment than we have in booming urban areas. These visits prompt the same question: How can we spread the civic mind-set they have in abundance?

Those of us who live out here in fly-over country can't help but be cheered by that kind of opening paragraph. David Brooks, who is always worth reading, started a New York Times column last week ("What Rural America Has to Teach Us") with that sweet opener, then went on to flesh out his claims with what he saw and heard on a visit to Nebraska's flood-ravaged small towns.

One of the town's bankers, he says, has a weekly calendar packed with volunteer stuff, while his sister-in-law, a mother of seven,  

writes for the newspaper, coaches swimming, is a substitute teacher and bus driver, competes in ironman triathlons, works at the Y, helps run a concert series, helped organize the building of the dog park, helps out with the high school discipline program and seems to sit on every spontaneous civic organization that pops up.

What he found and what he suggested suburban and urban America import from the hinterlands where I live is a commitment to community seen rarely outside of these small towns.  

Which is not to say there are no problems in River City (he pitched his tent at McCook and Grand Island). Managing cross-cultural change requires some grace here as anywhere, and the communities tend to lose a lot of children who get college degrees and never return. 

For better or worse, Brooks claims that "community" is huge in rural America, that out here people share and trust and contribute devotedly to the public weal. "Constantly they are thinking: Does this help my town or hurt it?" he says in conclusion. "And when you tell them that this pervasive civic mind-set is an unusual way to be, they look at you blankly because they can’t fathom any other."

It's a puff piece by a New York City columnist with a national readership, a thoughtful moralist writing about places where he was almost certainly the only Jewish person in the coffee shops he visited. 

Our own Fourth District Rep, Mr. Steven King, who loves headlines, did the same thing last week: he lauded rural Americans who pitch in when the guy down the road has health problems, or the neighbor's got water in his basement. . .again. He was talking about his constituents, and he wasn't wrong. Neighborliness thrives here. Every fall, every small-town rag does at least one story about local farmers who, some bright morning, gang up their corn pickers and harvest a crop for a farm wife recently widowed or some guy nursing cancer. It happens. Every year. 

The truth is, David Brooks and Steve King said the same thing last week, but Steve King determined, as he always does, to be mean and racist. "Here's what FEMA tells me," Mr. King told a town hall somewhere near here. "We go to a place like New Orleans, and everybody's looking around saying, 'Who's going to help me? Who's going to help me?'"

Make no mistake. He's talking about African-Americans. He might deny that, but he's equivocating, and even his fellow Republicans know it. That's why he's been stripped of his committee assignments.

Someone ought to tell Steve King to read David Brooks. Someone ought to send him this url. Someone ought to point out that it's not just what he says that gets him hated, it's the shape and edge of his arrogance, the hateful, racist rhetoric of his words. 

What I'm saying is that last week the two of them, David Brooks and Steve King, essentially said the same thing. But Steve King's racial pride is hateful. He can't speak without opening wounds because he seems to want to see blood spill out on the ground. 

Even when what he says is true, he can't stanch his hateful arrogance. What comes out has no grace.

Sunday Morning Meds--Binding wounds

“He heals the brokenhearted 

and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3 

Our newspaper cunningly stopped placing free obituaries a few years ago; today, obits are paid columns; almost daily, those notices spread over two whole pages of the front news section. Even though no one has ever escaped it, death is still news.

Some more so than others. Soon, my wife’s mother will pass away. For her, it couldn’t be soon enough. She has no mobility, very little sight, feels constant dizziness. When she goes, we’ll ache; but there will be precious few at her funeral, and other than the effect on her husband and my wife, she will leave this world almost seamlessly.

I remember a few tragic accidents of my boyhood, and children lost to friends. I wasn’t at my father’s bedside when he died, but I was there for hours before the night he finally succumbed. I’ve not been the same since.

In the town where I live, the death I’ll not forget is the passing of a high school senior who fell to a mysterious killer that took her slowly, while all around her hundreds of thousands of prayers rose daily. A teacher at the Christian school she attended told me it was the worst semester he’d ever spent in education because the kids—unaccustomed to death and drawn like moths to the flame of deep emotion—simply couldn’t study. Their friend was dying, and no one—not even God almighty—seemed able to lift a finger.

Finally, months after first feeling something akin to flu symptoms, she fell to that mysterious disease—mercifully, I suppose. What once seemed beyond belief became, well, inexorable. But it took months. Imagine the endless, fervent prayers of hundreds of high school classmates. Imagine the minds, hearts, and souls of her two parents.

One of the most difficult lessons one learns is that sometimes God doesn’t answer prayers, no matter how often we pound on his door or how arduously we beg. Sometimes we just don’t get what we want.

Her parents worship beside us every Sunday. They carry wounds whose flow of grief in the last decade hasn’t been totally stanched. The death of their daughter must rise from the broad plains of their many years together like some black obelisk of cut glass. It will always be that way—until the day each of them are gone.

Life in that high school has returned to normal. Talking about what happened a decade ago would be as ho-hum-ish as a history lesson. A few staff remember. There may be a picture of her on a wall, but few students have any idea about her story.

Believers like me live in the assurance that assertions like this one—“he heals the brokenhearted”—isn’t just cheerleading, even though we know mysterious killers stalk the countryside. Faith consents to the illogical assertion that somehow He will be there, even when he seems to be out of the building, that he will heal, that he will, forever and ever, bind up our wounds. Faith sinks its teeth in and tries, with Another's help, to hold on.

Morning Thanks--Reunion

I'd put my life on hold for a time. I was graduating from college with a degree in English, I'd had a successful student teaching run, and had always assumed I'd be a teacher someday, a teacher and a coach. 

But the draft board had lined me up for a physical in Sioux Falls, SD, close to the college I was leaving. That was May, 1970.

Several years earlier, our family doctor told me my heart wasn't exactly on point. Years later, subsequent specialists called it "chaotic," or "irregularly irregular," bizarre beating that had occasionally kept me from doing things--I'd pulled myself out of basketball games if it would go on a tear. But I'd learned how to control it, mostly. Dr. Jensen told me I'd never have to go to Vietnam, not with my weird ticker. 

Still, I had been the catcher on the college baseball team. I was active, healthy. When I see pictures of me from that time, it hard to remember being that thin. But I'd put my life on hold because of the notice to report. I hadn't applied for jobs, hadn't determined what I was going to do. . .couldn't figure out what I was going to do, I would have said, until that draft thing was decided.

In Sioux Falls, I pulled out a letter from the doctor and just like that, the guy in the uniform told me to put my pants back on and go home. There'd be no draft, no armed service, no Vietnam. A weird ticker was a ticket home.

By then it was June. I laid sod for an outfit putting in 1-43 along the Lake Michigan shoreline, Milwaukee to Green Bay. Hardest work I'd ever done in my life--twelve hours, six to six. I'd come home and just lie in the grass and remind myself I had options, a college degree. Besides, the idea of teaching Thoreau and Emerson and Poe was thrilling--scary, but thrilling. I didn't want to lay sod. 

The ad appeared in a Sunday Milwaukee Journal--some rural high school in southwest Wisconsin needed an English teacher. That was July, 1970. I applied. Went for an interview all the way down to the state line, where the boss said he needed someone to do theater, coach basketball, and teach English. I fit. 

He told me my teaching recommendations weren't all syrupy. He said some mentioned I was a bit of a rebel. "You want to explain that?" he said. When I told him I opposed the war and I was known to drink beer. "Seriously?" he said. We were less than an hour from Madison, and he was a lifelong resident of a state famous for Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz. I got the job.

I found a place to live, but it was still occupied, so the night before my first day of teaching I was a resident of an ancient downtown hotel in Monroe, WI. Before my eyes were the names of half a high school on the roll, those registered in junior and senior English, and a journalism class. The student newspaper was my ballywick too. That picture up top--that's journalism class. Color it slack. (That's me, sitting, far left, great tie.)

For the next two years, the students at Black Hawk High School, South Wayne, WI, were just about my reason for living. It didn't take long, and one morning when the room emptied for lunch, I told myself I could do this thing. I'd seen it in their eyes, heard it in the tone of their voices. They may not have liked Ralph Waldo Emerson, but they liked the guy who tried to make him live.

I remember thinking that I was just five years older than they were. Those five years made a ton of difference, but I also remember thinking that when I'd be 65, they'd be 60, and who the heck would know? 

Wednesday night, I got a blessing. One of those kids got herself on a library board in the Black Hawk district and talked the powers that be into asking me to come to talk about my books, about writing. 

Date was set. I came back again, rode around the towns and beautiful river hills of southwest Wisconsin, remembering. That night, maybe 25 of my ex-students showed up, most of them, like me, retired, some, like me, a little more paunchy and wrinkled, but just as spirited as ever. 

It's difficult to overstate how sweet that night was, and I don't even think I know how to describe it. It was as if nothing had changed, and everything had. I don't know that I talked much about writing, and Emerson never came up, although Jonathan Edwards did, bless his soul. And then there was the time I chased a kid out of class, and a shelf full of anecdotes I'd completely forgotten. And, of course, the story I've been telling all week--they all remembered that one too. Very well.

Thousands of these posts are banked in Blogspot's memory, many with the original intent of thankfulness. The old disgraced storyteller Garrison Keillor gave me a quote that I've never replaced--the world would be a better place if everybody took the time each day to be thankful for just one thing. He said it better. Its still up on the top of the page. Read it for yourself.

At the end of this recital of what I did with my time and my old students on Wednesday night, I'm going to say it again: this morning I'm thankful for those ex-students at the top of the page and the others too, for what I remember of them almost fifty years ago, and what they gave me, simply by their presence, their smiles, and their joy, on Wednesday night. 

Once upon a time they were my whole life. It was a honor and blessing and a thrill too to be in their presence one more time. 

The Whiz--a story (vi)

The next period most of those math students came downstairs to my room for sixth period English. I didn't know what had happened, but I could tell the moment they came in that something had occurred which left them speechless.

One of the guys who'd helped him told my class very respectfully how Mr. Walters' arms were shaking when he held them. He explained how what the man had said earlier, yelled really, didn't make any sense to anybody, and how he'd aimed it all at Jessica, and how horrible it must have been to be the kid who caught all that screaming. It was about the worst experience he'd ever had, he said, to see someone blow a fuse that way, just lose it right in public. "And Walters too," he told the others. "Geez, I mean, who'd have ever thought it would be Walters, you know?—I mean, I thought he was already crazy."

Jessica went home. Simon Walters did too, the principal driving him. He stayed out of school for almost five weeks, until the school board thought it was safe to let him finish the year, psychologists indicating that it would be okay, even therapeutic for him to return to the classroom.

When he came back, everyone asked him how it was going—maybe it was the first time in all those years he'd been at Arrowhead that anyone had paid much attention to him, in or out of the teachers' lounge.

Jessica never told anyone what he'd said or done the night before.

I was the only one who knew what was going on, and I didn't say a thing. Jess never spilled a word to Templeton either. It was something only the two of us knew—the three of us, Simon Walters too.

That was years ago. Today, Simon Walters might have gone to jail if the whole truth were ever told. Certainly, he would have lost his job. As far as I know, he's still there at Arrowhead.

I could have told Templeton everything Jess told me—and if I would have, he certainly would have pressed her for every little detail. She could have told him too, but she didn't. She was powerless, really, and maybe it's taken me all this time to understand that. Maybe that's why she never told the principal anything more than that Mr. Walters just had a nervous breakdown.

Maybe I didn't tell Templeton because I was already starting to know Simon Walter's loneliness. Maybe I didn't tell because I was a teacher, or because I'm a man.

Maybe I didn't tell because I wanted to protect Jessica from the public slime of being Walters' victim, to keep a young woman already short in self-esteem from the ignominy of a kinky association with a tall, gangly psycho old enough to be her father, a man who was, by and large, a decent teacher, but like so many of us, starved, I suppose, for love.

Maybe I still can't see the whole thing objectively. 

*

I got a card from her today. She sends something at Christmas every five years or so. This one came more than a month before the holiday season, along with a letter she sent out to dozens of friends.

It says she changed jobs now--and addresses--and that she loves the new job, writing software for banks, because it allows her to stay home more often and brings in even more money than the high-pressured sales job she had with some Fortune 500 company.

The stationary's corners are decorated by little holly wreaths she drew in by hand, and she slipped in a snapshot of her kids, three of them, the oldest getting to high school age himself now. She knows it's early for Christmas, she says, but she knocked off two birds with one stone by announcing her address change and giving holiday wishes all in the same envelope, all with the same stamp.

"That's just like me, I know you're saying," she writes in the letter.

"I don't know where in my life I've picked up all the frugality, but it seems to get worse with age."

It's hard to imagine that Jessica Drost is thinking about aging.

She signed the card with a fountain pen, but what is conspicuous by its absence is her husband's name. "Love," it says, "Jess, Brittany, Stephen, and Zack." No Burt this year. No more husband.

There has been a divorce, it seems. It's obvious that she's suffered again, and I can't help but think I may be at least partially responsible for whatever travail she's not documented here. I'm the one who kept quiet as to what really happened between her and Simon Walters--protecting her, I thought, and him, and even me, I suppose, when what she likely needed back then, more than anything, was her own innocence. I know that now.

She came back to me a week after Mr. Walters lost it, came back to my room, and told me, without a tear, that it would be best if I not tell a soul what she'd told me in the cemetery. I never did.

On the picture, her auburn hair is cut short and neat, like an ex­ecutive's. Zack's in a surf shirt, like every other kid in junior high. Stephen is leaning just far enough for you to see three little stripes shaved in above his ear. A long-haired cat flops uncomfortably over little Brit­tany's arm. The picture was taken on a redwood deck, and there's a lake somewhere beyond the pines. She's got a better job now, she says, and from the looks on the faces of her kids, they're not as starved for love as she was—or Simon Walters, for that matter.

I know this-to me, the joy on those children's faces says that we all have to get up and move—Jessica Drost, Simon Walters, and even me too, I guess. I ask myself this, as a Christian: isn't the great lesson of the gospel simply this, that there is hope?

But I'm sorry, Jessica. I think I let you down.

Maybe it's not necessary for you anymore, but it is for me: it’s time I tell the story. 
_____________________ 
It's fiction. There was a student, she got abused, emotionally, by a teacher who one day lost it entirely in class. I'm the narrator here, but the story's reach is drawn from my imagination. "The Whiz" was written twenty years ago, decades before "Me-Too," but the narrator's reaction is mine--I'm ashamed of that "I think" in the second-to-last line; but that's a story for another time.

The Whiz--a story (v)

The whole story goes public in class.
_________________________

The next day, Simon Walters lost it all in class. Jessica and two others stood at the board working out a simple problem, the rest of the class diligently computing through the sub-stratum of the same exercise in their notebooks, likely as not glancing up once in a while to see how Jessica, the whiz, was accomplishing something that seemed to the others impenetrable.

No one knows what had happened between them the night I sent Jess back to math contest practice. I don't know either. Jessica never told me exactly.

But I can guess what happened because I think I understand something of Simon Walters. He likely tried to explain to Jessica once again how his soul was rushing headlong towards her in a way that he'd never felt before. He probably told her everything again, expecting her to return the intimacy. And he probably reached for her, expecting this very bright and mature student to be one, at least, who would love him.

But no one knows exactly what happened, and I fear the worst. Even then, I didn't really want to know. Maybe what I'm guessing is just the best possible face I can put on Simon Walters. Maybe it's the maleness in me that I'm still trying to protect.

The next day in class, Jess stood in front with the chalk in her hand, trying to wrench the right answer from some stubborn puzzle on the board, and she wasn't getting it. But no kid in that room understood why not. There was more in her figuring than what she was scribbling, but when she didn't get it right, Simon Walters' best student, the one he'd opened up to the night before—when she didn't get the answer, he took it personally. It drove him crazy, and he blew his mind all over that classroom.

"I try and I try, and I try," he screamed. "I give my life for my students, and what do I get for it? Does anyone every appreciate me?" He screamed directly at Jessica.

The kids stared, petrified, at the assault.

"You can't believe how hard I work around here-how much I care."

He turned to the rest of them. "I want you kids to learn this. I want you to leave my classroom knowing this stuff. I give my life for this, and what do I get back? Does anyone ever say anything?" he yelled. "Does anybody ever say thanks? Do I ever get a yearbook dedicated to me? What do I have to do?"

He turned back to her, in silence. He caught himself for a moment, I guess, then looked back at the class, his eyes unfocused, as if he recognized none of them. He stepped back, felt behind him for the cor­ner of his desk, and brought himself slowly around to his chair, still glancing back and forth between Jessica and the rest of the kids. Blindly, he sat down, stunned, they said, as if suddenly embarrassed. Then he dropped his head into his hands and started to cry out loud.

Jessica stood stiff at the board.

He sat there before them crying, then came up once more and looked at them again, eyes full of tears. "And you," he said to Jess, "you know what I mean. You—of all of them—know. And you don't even care."

That's when Jessica ran.

The others stared blankly at each other as Simon Walters put his head down once again when he saw her leave. "I try and I try and I try," he said again, banging his fists on the desk. "I try and I try and nobody cares—no one," he said.

He pulled both arms up around his face and lay there on the desk bawling. The kids waited, looking at each other, wondering what to do. When the sobbing stopped, two of them, football players, took it upon themselves to walk to his desk--at least that's the way the story went.

They took hold of Simon Walters' elbows, got him to sit straight, then helped him to his feet. "You need to get out of here for awhile," one of them said, almost in a whisper. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Mr. Templeton met them at the door because Jessica, this time, hadn't simply run out of school.
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Tomorrow: And then what happened. . .

The Whiz--a story (iv)

Teacher is on walk with student. She finally tells him what's wrong, the source of her anxiety. The teacher's reaction, in some ways my own I confess, was probably not unusual fifty years ago.
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She blew a moist breath over her glasses and rubbed them with a balled Kleenex she'd pulled from her pocket. "It's my fault, I think. If I wasn't there, there wouldn't be a problem," she said. "He's not a bad man, Mr. Soerens, but it's just that I can't be around him."

I wanted to touch her myself right then, I wanted to comfort her in my arms. "You think I should just quit the whole deal?" she said.

I don't know why I said what I did. I really don't. It was so much easier, I think, just to keep it quiet, to keep the lid on. I suppose I was thinking the same way she was, that there was more to lose all the way around if the truth were known. I was no Walters, but maybe I even wanted to protect myself--I don't know.

"What should I do?" she said.

"Don't tell Templeton," I told her. "Just be sure that tonight he can't get you alone. Leave early," I said. "Do something."

"I can't," she said.

"Try," I said. "Just don't put yourself in any kind of position where it might happen again. Stay away from him."

I suppose I assumed that the fear across her face, in the way her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed—I suppose I thought that was only natural. What did I know, really?

When we walked back to school, we walked through an uneven cadence of grunts, three or four guys in dirty practice jerseys lowering their shoulders and butting the blocking sled around the field, the coach astride the machine in front of them, yelling derisively. All the way back, I had Jessica on one side, almost silent, and the football team grunting on the other.
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Tomorrow: . . .the next day in school. 

The Whiz--a story (iii)

She was talking about Simon Walters, Mr. Math, a man who so rarely came into the teachers' lounge that first semester that even though we shared a free period, I'd barely said a word to him since I came to Arrowhead. When we talked, he asked such obvious questions that I knew he was working hard at trying to be social. "So, Marshall, I saw you with golf clubs yesterday—you golf, do you?" Every word coming out nervously, words as bite-sized as numbers.

His gangly body was little more than a rack for the double-breasted suits he always wore, in the era of beards and beads. He kept his wispy mustache barely visible, and parted what was left of his hair down the center, about ten years before it became popular. He couldn't have weighed more than say, 120, just out of the shower.

"You don't like Walters," I said, not so much as a question.

"I feel sorry for him," she said. "I really do. Do you realize how much he's given to kids since he's been here? You don't know, Mr. Soerens. He's been here forever, and what's he ever got out of it? Even my dead brother got a yearbook dedicated to him."

"Jess," I said, "I don't get this at all."

"I don't want to ever see him again," she said. "I want to get out of your stupid essay assignment, and I want to quit math, and I want to leave Arrowhead, and I want to die."

"Jess," I said, but that's when it came, when it all poured out, finally, when the tide of her pain couldn't be held back.

"I let him say things to me that he shouldn't say to a student, Mr. Soerens. I let him tell me things I shouldn't have to hear, and it makes me want to puke. He's so lonely. He just says this stuff to me and expects--"

"What kind of stuff?"

She picked a stick off the ground and broke it in pieces. "Must I draw you a picture?"

"It makes you uncomfortable?" I said.

"No," she sneered. "I take all my teachers out here so I can bawl my head off."

I was barely 22, a first-year teacher who drew his daily breath from five periods of teaching English in a basement room where each day I fed my spirit on the lives of my students. Lord knows, alone in the country with Jessica, my brightest student, somebody who talked to me like an adult, I felt no more than a foot away from being another Simon Walters, a man who, it seemed, had unbuttoned his loneliness to the only student he respected enough to want her to understand him.

It pains me to say it, but I think I understood Simon Walters more than I would have wanted to admit—much more, perhaps, than I understood the predicament of Jessica Drost.

"Did you tell Templeton?" I said, pointing back over my shoulder as if the principal stood just beyond the trees.

"I'm telling you," she said. "I know what Templeton will do."

And so did I.

"He says he loves me," she told me. "He stands there over my desk like the teacher, and when all those contest problems are finished, and the other kids are gone—then he tells me that stuff. And there I sit, beneath him, and he goes on and on."

I was, immediately, immensely uncomfortable, even though she was looking down at a stone, her arms crossed over her chest.

"He lives with his mother—did you know that? I mean, did he ever tell you that? I mean, do you ever talk to him?" she said, looking up, as if I were the guilty one. "You know, she treats him as if he was six years old--she does. He's got to do these jobs. She's got them written on the refrigerator-'take out the garbage'-that kind of stuff."

"He told you that?"

"Every single year there's a math contest, you know, and this is my last one. And every night he wants to take me home."

She was almost crying, I remember. ''I'm scared to death of him," she said.

I didn't know how to handle it. I really didn't. I felt almost nauseous. "Did you tell him?" I said.

She laughed. "How do you say no to a teacher?" she said, her bot­tom lip in her teeth. "And he touched me," she said. "Last night he touched me. He tried to make out with me."
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Tomorrow: What to do. . .

Sunday Morning Meds--Goosebumps

How good it is to sing praises to our God, 

how pleasant and fitting to praise him!” Psalm 147:1

I remember a certain species of goosebumps, my first. I was twelve maybe, part of a choir festival a half century ago in a small town in Wisconsin, hundreds of kids drawn from a dozen Christian schools. The music was Bach—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” For almost fifty years I’ve not been able to hear that piece without remembering that day. My entire self—heart, soul, mind, and strength—reacted to the beauty of the moment.

Those goosebumps arrived in an afternoon rehearsal before the big concert at night—I remember that. I remember what that gymnasium looked like, which step I occupied on the bleachers, and some of the kids around me; and I remember being embarrassed because this unmanly tearful impulse—which I loved anyway—was still a threat that required some early drafts of testosterone to stifle.

The music was gorgeous. But my girlfriend was there, and I haven’t forgotten that either. She stood a row or two beneath me in the choir, and her being there was part of this strange emotional seizure I experienced. I don’t know that the music alone would have raised such a visceral reaction. My seeing her, a row or two beneath me was part of the moment too.

And I suppose faith was part of it—we were singing about Jesus, of course, and we were all kids from Christian schools; and then there was the beautiful music too—we couldn’t do much better than J. S. Bach; and my girlfriend—most of us experience love long before we can define it. Being part of something so much bigger than myself had to play a role as well—all these kids were making a beautiful, joyful noise.

Psalm 147 says, first thing out of the box, how pleasant it is praise him—how pleasant. It’s an amazingly human assertion: praising God feels good. The first declaration of this psalm has nothing to do with our duty (“we should praise him”) or his wanting our praise. Instead, the psalm starts with the Me Generation: hey, it feels good. And it’s fitting too.

I wonder whether my skin turned inside out and my tears ducts spontaneously threatened because, maybe for the first time, my “self” almost disappeared. I got lost in the music, lost in affection, lost in the joyful affirmation of group love that is choral music, lost in all those things, lost in plain beauty, just flat-out lost.

Self-lessness is a good thing. Love is selfless. Heroism is selfless. Vivid spiritual experience is always selfless. When Mariane Pearl heard of her husband Danny’s brutal execution at the hands of terrorists, she said she was able to handle it because she’d been chanting. She’s Hindu. “The real benefit of having practiced and chanted was that at that moment was that I was so clear on what was going on. This is a time when I didn’t think about myself at all,” she says.

Sometimes it’s just good to lose yourself. It’s good to praise, to give yourself to God. It’s good to love, to give yourself away. Praise—whether it’s evoked by a Bach chorale or bright new dawn—gives us a chance to empty ourselves.

And that’s good, I think, and it’s pleasant, I know, and it’s fitting before the King—our King, the joy of man’s desiring. 

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From Sixty at Sixty, CRC Publications, 2008. 

The Ides of March

What we are learning, by way of one trying experience after another, is that no two Floyd River floods are alike. This week's extravaganza crept up as menacingly as the last one, lapped a bit at our backyard, almost to the rocks. But the debris this time is unique. My word, behind our place we've got an ice garden the likes of which we've never seen, nor may again (D.V., as the church bulletin used to say).

The video up top was Thursday night. This one was shot on Friday morning--sunny sky, but, voila!, a junkyard, hundreds, thousands, of ice chunks, some of them big as a roof. 

Weird. Unique really, a phenomenon created by a set of factors that may well not be replicated (we hope). Six weeks or more of temperatures that never inched a degree above freezing put down a pavement of ice that could have held a tank. Look at the thickness of these backyard chunks.

Wednesday we got rain. Not that much really, maybe four inches or so, enough to take out the considerable snow depth all around. Combine the rain and snow melt over permafrost ground, and all that water had to go somewhere. So it went where it always does, downhill, and ended up swelling up the Floyd to record limits once again--third time in eight months--and breaking all that ice into huge chunks.

But there's more. In the wake of the precip and all that melting came fifty-mph winds sweeping down from somewhere north of Santa. Mega-winds tore over Lake Floyd and scrunched a thousand ice bergs up into our backyard acre.  My word! do we have ice. 

Look at 'em. Literally tons, a used car lot of Floyd River icebergs.  

This one in the foreground is twenty feet long. Looks like a chunk of a gym floor. Plenty of others too. Take your pick. U-haul. No charge. 

Here's the scene at sundown last night. 

It may well have been the Ides of March, but this flood is the spawn of a winter deep freeze. Amazingly, what we had this week was an anomaly, an actual winter flood that may not happen again. (That'd be nice.)

There are people hurting, I know throughout the Midwest. Thankfully, the river's icy wreckage left us pretty much alone. There'll be a mess out back, but then nature has a way of repairing itself. 

It's a mess. Still, I can't help thinking that in all that junked tonnage, there's a unique magnificence too, an awesome icy train wreck just out back right now. 

The Whiz--a story (ii)

Jess wants to talk, but it takes some persuasion.
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What brings back the memory is the letter I got from her today, the letter and the sound of the football team, whose shouts are now echoing through the already leafless trees across the street, the cadence of grunts from the field several blocks away from our house. I hear every exercise the coach has scribbled on the clipboard, and each rally of the kids' clapping once they've finished. It's such a male sound.

It's the sound I remember echoing across the football field when the two of us, Jessica and I, walked on the crumbling edge of a blacktop road north of the school. That's where Jessica told me about Walters, and math.

"I can't be with him again," she said. "I can't go back there tonight. I'm sorry," she told me. "Maybe it sounds like I'm backing out, but I don't care."

Cars passed us slowly as we left the school. "I don't get it," I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“It's all because I got brains, see?" she said. "I can't help it that math comes easy. I really can't. Sometimes I try to block it off, but I just get the stuff right away."

Away from school, she spoke more with her hands than she had at my desk.

"Look," she said, "if I quit, people will say, 'Why in the world isn't Jess in the math thing?' That's what they'll say. You know they will."

Nine weeks into my first year of teaching. What did I know? "Big deal," I said.

"I shouldn't care about what people think?" she said.

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to do," I told her.

"Easy for you to say," she said.

But I was worried about the two of us out there alone, what some young mother might think, some woman picking up her daughter after school.

"Am I taking up your precious time here or what?" she said.

No student had talked to me like that before. "What's the matter?" I said. "You say you don't want to be in the math contest?-all right, quit. Tell Walters you're out."

Leaves in the grasp of a northwest wind drifted across the road and blew into the stubbled fields running up the hills to the south. She pushed both her hands into her jacket pockets, and I pulled up my collar.

But that was it for awhile. She didn't say another word as we kept walking east past the football field and out towards the town cemetery. Behind us, I wondered what the guys on the team thought of the two of us.

I waited for awhile, and then, once we neared the cemetery, I asked her if she had family there, more to break the silence than anything.

"A brother," she told me, as if I should have known. "He got killed in an accident when I was ten." She walked into the grass and pointed toward a back section where the graves were smaller. "Over there," she said. "I don't think you can see it from here exactly." She stuck her hands back in her pockets. "He got the annual dedicated to him," she said. "You can look it up. He's got his picture in it. So tell me, why do people do that--dedicate something to somebody who's already dead?"

"Probably made your folks feel good," I said.

"My dad drinks every night," she said. "He drank before too. He works at the brewery--I mean, you can drink there all day long if you want, as long as you do your job. And at night. He drinks at night too."

"Gets drunk?" I asked.

"Falls asleep in his chair." She turned her head and pointed farther east. "Bruce Richter's father is out there--that new grave. Every time I see him in school, I kind of shrink, you know. You just don't know what to say to a kid whose father hung himself. Do you say your sorry, or what?—I’m sorry your father hung himself—how does that sound?"

"I didn't know that," I said.

"There's a lot you don't know," she told me.

Some kid went by and laid on the horn. "Skip Jackson," she said. "He lives next door. He seems like such a kid to be driving already-"

"I don't know him," I said.

"He's a sophomore?—thin, lots of zits?"

I shook my head. "What are we doing here, Jess?" I said. "Is it your father you want to talk about or what? Why am I out here?"

She took a deep breath, looked up at the streaks of clouds across a flat autumn sky, and almost lost herself when finally it came out. "I can't stand him," she said, "even in class. I didn't go today, you know. I skipped until eleven. Can you imagine that?—Jessica Drost skipping class?"

She walked farther into the stones, and I followed her. "I can't stand it that he can talk that way about stupid math problems when I know he doesn't even care. He just goes on and on as if doing stupid prob­lems is a really big deal with him, but it isn't. I know."

She was talking about Simon Walters, Mr. Math,. . .

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Tomorrow: Jess opens up about the relationship.

The Whiz--a story (i)

For the week, a story, this one drawn from a my teaching days (that's me--far, far left, in the tie). The story fiction, but the story line shadows an experience I remember well, not because I was ever a part of it, but because what happened between a student and a teacher happened just an hour before that whole class of kids showed up in my classroom. That hour I've not forgotten. It's a kind of "Me-Too" story that took place almost 50 years ago.
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Poor Jessica. Her sun-streaked auburn hair was wonderfully wavy, but ironed flatness was still all the rage back then. She had dark, clear skin, but her glasses rather unpleasantly magnified her otherwise beautiful brown eyes and became a symbol of her isolation from the other kids: she loved to read, which, back then, just as today, is something of a social handicap in high school. A beautician might have trimmed her eyebrows, but I thought that heavy line drew maturity into her face.

To students, she was bookish and slightly overweight. To most faculty, including me, she was beautiful.

Poor Jessica. She came to me after school to get out of an essay: ­"React to Sir Francis Bacon's 'On Marriage and Single Life.'" It's odd to think that I ever assigned something like that, but that was years ago.

She couldn't do the assignment, she said, not with the math contest staring her down. Poor Jessica. Valedictorian. Stage manager for my first play. Editor of the newspaper. Did everything in high school ex­cept play basketball.

"That's okay," I told her. "Hand it in when you get time. Get yourself ready for math."

"I hate math," she said right away.

"You do not," I told her.

"I do too," she snapped.

"You're our only hope," I said. "Walters says--"

"I don't want to be the 'only hope,''' she said. "Who wants to be somebody's 'only hope,' Mr. Soerens?" She turned her face into a sickly smile.

"Okay then," I said, "don’t go."

"Sure," she said, "and do you realize what people would say?"

I was working on a mimeo master, scratching in the last few feathers on the portrait of the Indian warrior we used on the newspaper's masthead. I never even looked up as I remember. "Since when do you care what people think, Jess?" I said.

"Well thanks," she said.

''I'm pulling your leg," I told her. "Can't you tell when I'm kidding? Get it in when you can—now go fiddle with a slide rule or something."

I was single, four years older than she was; it was my first year teaching, and a young mature woman like Jessica, even though I don't think I understood it then, made me nervous.

She picked up a piece of chalk from the blackboard gutter and drew a cartoon tree on the board. "You don't want to talk to me," she said.

That's when I looked up. Her line was purely junior high, not typically Jessica, a senior, the smartest kid in school.

"What's the deal?” I said.

"I love math," she said suddenly, "I do." She shrugged her shoulders. "You think I'm crazy, don't you? You said in class that you always hated it and you didn't understand how people-"

"Jess," I said, "I don't think you're crazy for liking math." I pick­ed up the master I was working on and held it up to the light to check my work. "Hey, listen--how about I put a goatee on the warrior?" It wasn't time for a joke.

“’On Marriage and Single Life,’” she said, "--right? That's the assign­ment? Well, here's my essay, ‘I'm getting married.’ That's my essay. You always say that we should make a commitment to what we write. I'm getting married.”

"Do I know the guy?" I said.

"You never met him."

It was unlike her to come to talk to me. She was nervous--agitated, clearly, and I was young. I thought immediately that she was telling me she was pregnant. And it all made sense. In a moment, I had writ­ten the entire story: smart girl, lonely, no dates, not bad looking. She picks up some farm kid, maybe an older guy looking for someone to come live out on that acreage his old man wants to buy. She fools around because she's curious, and besides, she wants to be loved more than anything.

In a minute I had it all figured out, so I spit it out, half in jest, allowing her the convenience to respond in whatever voice she wanted.

"You're pregnant," I said.

"I wish! Miss Goody Two-shoes?" she mocked.

I swung my chair around and stuck the tool away. "Jess," I said, "have you got something you want to tell me, or what?"

I think most students, male or female, would have just spit it out after standing there that long, but Jessica had brains enough to fight off her emotions.

"Can we go outside or something?" she said.
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Tomorrow: the story slowly emerges.