Ecclesiastes 8:15

Seriously, what's not to love here?

My Dutch Calvinist preacher/grandfather would have found something, I'm sure. But then his generation of believers was far more confident about the pervasive "powers of darkness," even though he likely never met a witch, even of the Halloween variety.

I didn't trick-or-treat as a boy. 'Twas verboten. What's more, I was an obliging child: if Mom and Dad made it clear that children of the light didn't march up and down the streets like children of darkness, I didn't pout, or, as the Dutch would say, zannik. I didn't go.

But, soon enough, neither did I stay home. The truth is, my earliest memories of Halloween are, well, just slightly naughty. I'd pilfer a bar of soap and take off. Then, after meeting up with a couple more naughty boys, we'd set about soaping windows, sometimes at random, sometime with intent. My earliest memories of Halloween are prank-filled, some of those pranks being a little dirty, some dangerous, some just plain pranks. I don't remember ever being transformed as a ghoul or goblin or witch, then coming home with a sack full of candy. Naughty sure, but never a witch. 

Just look at her. Isn't she a doll? She's my granddaughter, set for the gala evening's coven.

In the Christian school I attended, we weren't even to whisper the word Halloween because the October 31 holiday belonged to the Reformation and those theses nailed to the door, fluttering in the Wittenburg wind. Did you know there were holes in Luther's cassock from his determined effort to ascend a couple thousand church steps on his knees and thereby, through sheer persistence and hard work, earn his own salvation? You know the story--saved by grace alone. October 31 belonged to Luther and Calvin and John Knox, belonged to God--not Satan.

But today things are a little more complicated, a little more muddied. That witch's costume doesn't mean our granddaughter's loving parents have handed her over to the Devil. Here she is, dressed for a holiday day-care party at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church. 

(Just in case, like me, you're not acquainted with Roman Catholic saints, our precious granddaughter is dressed as St. Gianna Beretta Molla, a 20th century Italian who chose life for her child and death for herself when the only way for her to remain alive was to abort the child.)

It's perfectly clear that our granddaughter is still a bit too young for Luther, too young also too young to have much to say about St. Gianna's pregnancy, too young to understand that bright orange skirt or the floppy pointed hat of her witch's garb. And, thank goodness, she's too young to even think about stealing a bar of soap from the bathroom like her grandpa did, then attacking neighbors' windows.

She's still too young to say "Halloween." What she will understand, however, is that tonight that purple plastic pail will fill with treats, many of which could well be verboten any other night of the year, but tonight--"yeah, sure, have another--Halloween happens only once a year."

What we all know--her great-great-grandfather the Dominie, his slightly disapproving children (my parents), her Grandpa and Grandma Schaap (my wife and I), and her parents too is that soon enough she'll learn about the mess we call history, about "here-I-stand" theologies, and the real powers of darkness.

That day'll come soon enough, this grandpa says. Tonight, eat, drink, and be merry.

That's biblical too. Look it up.

Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanks-giving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordain'd with cross'd hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, . . .

Unmistakably Whitman. Unmistakably pagan, or unimaginably religious, Walt Whitman, a poet whose barbaric yawp I heard in college, did much to shape me, even though today--so many years later--I find him just as dense as I ever did. 

The lines above are from Song of Myself, a huge poem he never stopped writing. Its place in the canon of American literature is safe and sound, as long as there is a canon of American literature. That snippet is quintessential Whitman, a compendium of American life, a picture book of men and women he claimed to love, even to embrace. As a poet, he embraced the world, or tried, wanted--desired!--everything and everybody. He knew both the impossibility and the seduction of such a quest, to truly love, and love, well, everything.

The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm'd case,
(He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother's bed-room;)
The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case,
He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript;
The malform'd limbs are tied to the surgeon's table,

What is removed drops horribly in a pail; . . .

Nothing escapes him or his embrace. He won't let it. Hence, accusations of lewdness made his poems scandalous in their time, maybe even ours. Here was a preposterous egotist who claimed to love the scent of his own armpits, a man whose "self" threatened American sensitivities, even though he taking great joy in that "self" made him--or so he claimed--a part of everything and everyone else. Go ahead and curl your mind around that.

Confusing? Yes. Always. But in 1968, when I was 20 years old, in the middle of a divided nation whose war was beginning to look like a horrible national mistake, Whitman's expansive embrace, his very "common grace," felt somehow like gospel. The game his poetry still plays--"what on earth does he mean?"--I found stimulating, not because there were answers but because there weren't. Leaves of Grass meant something fascinating, that much I knew. But what exactly?--I wasn't sure.

I'd learned my church catechism well as a boy, mastered q and a's well enough to pass muster when I met with the church's ruling council. Whitman's shadowy love poetry threatened the powerful walls catechism answers. In part, I suppose, I grew to love that which I could not know.

Whitman didn't ruin me, but he did please me, even helped me determine what I would do in my life. I remember walking to an American literature class on a sidewalk that's still there, and suddenly telling myself that if a life of teaching literature meant I could play with Whitman's odd singing, that life might be pleasing.

That's a poem, you say? Yes, that's a poem. That's Walt Whitman. 

The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove,
The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass,
The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;)
The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race,
The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs,
Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece;
The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee,
As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle,
The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,
The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the musical rain,
The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron,
The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm'd cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale,
The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways,
As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers,
The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots,. . .

On and on it goes, a Sears catalog of Americans, all of it of America, Whitman says. That's Whitman.

"It's a poem, you say?"

I don't know what else to call it. Today, Walt Whitman is as outlandish as he ever was. He's buried in a strange-looking vault in Camden, NJ, a stone haunt setup for Halloween, a place where trees all around bear the initials of those who loved him.

Walt Whitman had a birthday this year. Had he lived, he'd be 200 years old.

"Had he lived. . ." I don't know how to say it, but it seems to me he has.

Netherlandish Proverbs--(iv)

On this point, Trump lovers and haters agree: no one in the history of the American Presidency does a better job of shooting himself in the foot. 

Just about every last wound created by the Ukrainian story, a story which every day seems more capable of dethroning him, appears largely self-inflicted. He was the one who determined that Rudy--"America's Mayor"--should be given license to mess around in foreign policy (that butt-dial recording would have been flat-out hilarious if it wasn't so sleazy). Our President was the one who, despite warnings, pressed onward to make clear to the Ukranian President that anything he might want from America needed to be purchased at a price--quid pro quo--and did so in the presence of others.

And now, with the greatest single act in foreign affairs of his Presidency, he manages to muddy the praise his wonderful military accomplished by the silly, obscene braying of a child bully. "There is Nothing This Man Can't Wreck,"says NY Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens this morning. So immensely true.

In honor of the President's ability to shipwreck on his own island, I thought a little tour of applicable proverbs from Pieter Breugel might throw light on The Donald's almost instinctive ability to screw up his own fortunes.

Here's one. It's about ten o'clock or so, beneath a gaggle of gold coins spilling from above. A man is peeing on what appears to be a flag or sign with a crescent moon (we'll get to that, trust me); but behind him is a hole in the roof.

Een gat in het dak krijgen is what Brueghel is after, which suggests nasty things about the gentleman watering whatever's beneath him. I don't know whether there's an implication of the hole is his roof being a kind of hole in his head, but the substance of the wisdom here is having a hole in your roof is not particularly smart.

A long running dispute between Never Trumpers is whether the man's penchant for pulling on a dunce cap himself is indicative of his brilliance--sending the press on wild goose chases--or his stupidity. Whatever the cause, it seems to me that both critics and disciples can't help but admit that there are times when "he's got a hole in roof" feels like criticism with significant substance.

Here's another. You'll find this half-shod fella lower left.

Aan de eene voet een shoen, die andere blootvoet, which, I'm told, translates roughly to "one foot shod, the other bare." Intent is not so easy with this old Dutch proverb, but the upshot is that balance in all things is necessary. 

And then there's this one, which you'll find lower left center, at the bottom.

Men moet de schapen scheren ar naar ze wol hebben, a kind of warning to sheer the sheep, not skin them, the implication being that showing a little moderation in all things is a good thing. 

I don't remember whether or when our President might have been accused of moderation. 

Brueghel filled his canvases way back in the 16th century, but then some things about Trump are universal--hard as that is to believe.

Morning Thanks--Those who bring love

The young mom has family in our church, so when the accident happened, the seriousness of that young mom's injuries, and those of her little girl, climbed immediately to the top of the church's prayer list. After all, their injuries were burns, serious burns, third-degree burns, the kind that can take months to heal, if they do.

They have, but the healing won't be over for some time, so the rigors of therapy, begun maybe a week or so after the accident, continue. Yesterday, in church, a woman rose to say that this week the little girl was going to be visited by a social worker specially trained and experienced in doing what needs to be accomplished in the little girl's life right now.

She's four, I believe. I don't know how badly scarred she might be, but, given the seriousness of the injuries, it's impossible not to believe her life's journey won't be marked by what happened to her one day in the car. 

What is clear, or so we were told, was that at least one hand has no fingers, a fact the little girl hasn't really noticed yet because of the preponderance of bandaging she's had on her little hands and body ever since the accident. Sometime this week, maybe this morning, some of that bandaging will be removed--a good sign; but, for the first time, that little girl will note that the fire that nearly took her life did take her fingers. That trained and experienced counselor will walk into her room and into her life and, lovingly, try to explain to that child--four years old--that she can learn how to live without fingers. 

The requests for intercessory prayer is a much beloved part of worship at our church, even though there are times, like yesterday, when the stories behind the petitions can obliterate almost anything else that happens before or after. What's apparent with every word I've typed into this white space is that's exactly what happened to me yesterday: the most compelling moment of the service was a scene that hasn't yet happened, but will this week, maybe today. 

The sermon was terrific--something out of Romans. But the picture in my psyche features a social worker, man or woman, who knows how to talk to four-year-olds. Valiantly and tenderly, she accomplishes a job no one would really want to do. In my imagination it's a video, but there is no sound because I can't begin to imagine what I would say. I don't know the words. Even if I did, I don't think I'd be capable of saying them.

Down below my google page this morning, a little banner flashes symbols and thanks. Here it is, unmoving.

I snipped the line when the icon happened to be a stethoscope--it could have been a police hat or a fireman's helmet. Just so happens our son is a fireman. With him in a station, I'm more conscious of what we owe to our first responders than I'd been for most of my life.

But yesterday, and still this morning, I can't help but think about some man or woman, a kind of "first responder" in her own right, someone I don't know, who will walk into a hospital room and look at a badly burned little girl and smile, broadly, convincingly, then try to find a loving way into her four-year-old apprehension to let that child know she's very much alive and very much capable of doing just about anything.

This morning's thanks are for all our first responders, including our son, and also those nurses and aids in a million old folks homes, not to mention a host of hospice workers whose job it is to stand and sit with men and women who are leaving this life for the next. Last week, with a toughened smile, a nursing home worker told me that by her count she'd lost 77 patients. But then, no patient leaves that home alive.

But this morning especially, I'm thankful for a merciful someone who very soon will talk to a badly burned little girl about life without fingers, yet another of the servants all around us sworn to bring home nothing less than love.

Reading Mother Teresa--Beginnings

1935 Wall Street Journal

Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, 

that we may sing for joy 

and be glad all our days. Psalm 90:14

According to the Wall Street Journal of May 25, 1931, Treasury Secretary Mellon advised that the Hoover Administration was saying no to a tax increase, which was not to say, he asserted, that some kind of increase was definitely and finally off the table. Should they determine to hike taxes, the Treasury Department, he said, would seek broadening the tax base rather than simply raising rates. After all, only 2.5 million individuals out of a 120 million population pay income taxes, and 380,000 of those pay about 97 percent.

On May 25, 1931, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Investment Bankers Association of America listened to proposals designed to safeguard US investors when obtaining foreign securities because present conditions for such investments were bound to prolong economic depression.

On May 25, 1931, an editorial in the WSJ noted misleading coverage of the Supreme Court reversing a decision in the case of Yetta Stromberg, who’d been convicted under California’s “Red Flag” law for displaying a “red flag, banner, badge, or device of any color . . . as a sign of . . . opposition to organized government.” The court, the editorial argued, had left in place provisions against anarchy and sedition.

The Wall Street Journal of May 25, 1931, contains no mention of a young lady in India, Sister Teresa, making the first profession of her vows after two years of her novitiate training, vows that promised a life of “poverty, charity, and obedience.

“If you could know how happy I am, as Jesus’ little spouse,” she wrote a friend. “No one, not even those who are enjoying some happiness which in the world seems perfect, could I envy, because I am enjoying my complete happiness, even when I suffer something for my beloved Spouse."

I rather doubt her first profession was noted anywhere in the English-speaking world. Why should it have been?

Nothing the Wall Street Journal said that day was minuscule or incidental. Significant events were occurring, the country smack-dab in the middle of something people only later would call “The Great Depression.” I’m sure the Journal newsroom buzzed that day, breathed a collective sigh of relief once the first edition was out.

But on the other side of the world a young woman was taking her vows before God, vows that would lead to a lifelong profession of faith witnessed by most of the world.

Other than a few who witnessed the event, no one wrote up her story. Few cared.

Somehow, that it wasn’t a headline-maker seems a great blessing.

American Exceptionalism

Kenny was a kid, he told me--too young to go to war, but not too young to work. In Sioux City, Perry Creek had swollen into a torrent right then, wreaked havoc on more than a thousand houses on the city's west side. Mud roared into a thousand basements.

It was July, 1944, a month after D-Day, and hosts of able-bodied Siouxland men were off to war in Europe and the South Pacific, where hundreds were dying and casualty numbers were soaring. Of what importance, really, was a little creek in Sioux City, a flood that killed no one, even though it inconvenienced hundreds?

Kenny told me he signed up to be part of a church work group from Sioux Center, a few farmers, a bunch of high school guys, and a score of women and girls, all of whom volunteered to do flood relief.

There's only one way to get river muck out of a clogged basement: you get hold of the biggest pail you can lift, scoop it full of wet dirt, and carry it, a pailful at a time, up the basement stairs and outside, where you dump it. It's tedious and terribly hard work.

So sometime during the days Ken's church group was working, a couple dozen Italian prisoners of war--they all wore shirts with PW printed on the back--showed up out of nowhere, buckets in hand, and joined the help. Kenny was 16. He couldn't help but notice that these guys knew how to work. Not only that, the whole blame job was going to get done much faster because there were forty of them in all, from the Army's 7th Service Command in Omaha. One of those prisoners told him they spent their nights on cots at West Junior High.

What was clear is that they were pure blessing, Kenny said. But he told me that he himself, just a kid, had some growing up to do because at first it was a chore to be friendly when he knew these men had brothers somewhere in Italy who still put GIs in their crosshairs. These guys were the enemy, after all.

They didn't talk much, he said, didn't really establish a friendship; but when you spend a couple days doing all that grunt work together what eventually grows is a kind of respect that doesn't require chattiness. Years later, Ken told me that on that church work crew he'd come to realize, doing really crappy work, that beneath that PW on their backs there were men with a beating hearts and maybe even teenage sons they'd come to miss dearly.

All too often, people who talk about "American exceptionalism" are those who like to believe that God Almighty smiles more broadly when he looks over the fabled American landscape, that we are "the city on the hill" John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan said we were--and are. For some, talk of American exceptionalism is just another way of waving the stars-and-striped in the face of the rest of the world.

They could do better by reading up on the way the U. S. of A. treated its German, Irish, and Japanese prisoners of war, because the difference between the muddy basements of Perry Creek and railroad stations of Auschwitz and Buchenwald cannot be measured.

When the war ended, the men with PW on their backs changed into shirts that said nothing about them. Many of them wanted to stay. None could--the law required them to return; but not a few eventually did, some to live, others, nostalgically, to remember a time--well, look again at that picture at the top of the page.

The truth? It comes down, simply, to this: we treated our prisoners of war as if they were human beings; we treated them as we would have liked to be treated. 

That, I think, is "American exceptionalism."

Morning Thanks--Best Friends

I’m not sure where she found them, but leave it to my granddaughter to discover things in our house, things she can use or would like to. Jocelyn may well have a better sense for where my stuff is—even here in the basement—than I do.

Her mother was no different. I remember my mother-in-law, out on the farm, deliberately asking her granddaughter—then eight or nine or ten—where something was, maybe a serving plate, because, she’d say, little Andrea would know.

As does her daughter. Is that genetic?

Anyway, Jocelyn found these cards her grandmother probably lugged home purposefully, then promptly forgot to give away when the kids came. Lo and behold, she freed them from whatever junk drawer dungeon held them.

Immediately, she went to work. She once told her mother—she was no more than seven years old—that she didn’t have to clean up after her multitudinous projects because, well, she was an artist. I’m not sure that appraisal cemented any kind of bond betwixt mother and child, despite similar genetic codes.

But Jocey found ‘em, a whole ton of cards, then came up with a magic marker and began to address them, alphabetically, to her friends.

Just one of the joys of childhood is spontaneity, I guess, because once the card thing got old—maybe ten minutes later, they were abandoned, some of them dutifully addressed.

So when she and her brothers left that day and the dust had settled, I picked up after her, not being an artist myself and therefore sadly subject to Adam’s fall. Maybe a half dozen were addressed, but three even had messages. The first one—to Brianna—said, “Thank you for being my best friend.”

Now it doesn’t take much for my granddaughter to sweep me off my feet, so I thought that was just darling, even a little saintly.

Then I opened the second—to Makala—which said, “Thank you for being my best friend.”
Okay.

You can guess the third. Three sweet little cards to three best friends.

Is it any wonder why Jesus just loved kids? Sheesh. Wouldn’t I like to go back to a time when I could, in haloed innocence, repeat a single, stand-alone superlative three times over? I’ve seen sin in six-months-old kids, but I honestly don’t think that Ms. Jocey had any sense that what she’d written was duplicitous. She doesn’t even know the word. Of course, she is my only granddaughter.

She’s going into fourth grade this week*. I’ll give her this year—at best—in which she can get away with that kind of overdraft , and then, sadly enough, it’s the end of childhood, I suppose, and she becomes ineligible to sit on Jesus’s knee with the rest of the squirts.

But really--still. . .cute, eh? My goodness. When you're a kid you get three best friends.

Grandpa speaking, of course.

And that’s my morning thanks.
________________________

*Jocelyn is now a college freshman, and this little meditation is nine years old. For the record, I should mention also that she is no longer our only granddaughter. Times change :), for which we're thankful too.

Tales of Righteousness

I'll admit it--some stories spread a death-like pall over your day and keep you from sleep. Yesterday, I listened in on two of them when they appeared in my in-box and I was curious enough to listen in. I shouldn't have.

One of them was a monologue--read poorly, by the way--by a man named Paul Dorr, a man who believes himself to be Christianity's last frantic gasp. He's convinced that unless his own new dispensation ("Rescue the perishing") goes to war against the secular hosts who now run everything--churches, colleges, whatever--we're doomed. To hell.

Last year, Mr. Dorr courageously burned a half-dozen of Orange City Library's children's books he thought far too cuddly with the LGBTQ community. “Orange City Library, you won’t be peddling this one anymore,” Dorr said on video, tossing those books, one at a time, into the flames. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves and repent.” He meant you and me. For his criminal act, he was fined, I think (I don't know how the court case went because generally I choose not to follow his divine interventions). 

Last year, he just as bravely flew a plane that dragged a holy banner over the public dedication of a new building at Northwestern College because the honored former president, Dr. James Bultman, he was sure supported abortion, given that he wouldn't alter a story written about an Northwestern alum, a California doctor, who does, a man Lord Dorr considers a "baby killer." 

Yesterday it was a screed against Peter Wagner, publisher of the Northwest Iowa Review, a weekly newspaper the self-appointed Old Testament prophet considers wayward because The Review featured a story about Orange City's Gay Pride celebration. There the prophet stood, just outside the building where Wagner's paper is published, railing on him. This guy. Here's the picture Dorr is running on his website. 

But Dorr was only one story. Then there was another, a radio show from another brash Christian "ministry," this one based in Des Moines. Yesterday's edition featured Jacob Hall, Sioux Center's self-appointed prophet, who is equally adept at poking sticks in people's eyes to remove the motes only he, like Dorr, can see, a man burning with hellfire just like Mr. Dorr. 

Northwestern College took another beating when the hosts of the show made it perfectly clear that if and when NWC graduates don't toe the righteous lines they've laid in sand, then isn't the truth obvious: the institution itself is corrupt--or so they said. "By their fruits," you know.

I listened. Shouldn't have. It was fifty minutes of divine judgment heavy-laden with scripture passages to demonstrate their imperial righteousness. 

Thirty years ago or so, I read Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel that does its best to create a world run by true believers we might think of Puritans, people who create a repressive, sexist, nightmare world sustained by scriptures fascist rulers preach. 

Honestly, I remember not liking the novel. I thought Atwood had created a world that I couldn't imagine--Christians acting like the butchers at Buchenwald or Dachau. Interesting, but unconvincing because far-fetched. 

That was 1985. Today, I'm not so sure. Give Paul Dorr a chance and he'll create nightmares in the name of the Lord--his Lord. Let Jacob Hall have his way, and he'll do away with sin by establishing a kingdom of righteousness, Bible verses all over the walls, I'm sure. 

I shouldn't have listened to either. The thing is, today these people gather an audience, a fearful score of men and women who see legions of hell's most wretched descending Sioux County--people like this man carrying a sign, someone Pastor Dorr identifies as one of his disciples. To you, does that sign speak love or hate?

They're scary. They scare me anyway, because our own human propensity to fear what's unknown can so easily turn us all into self-appointed wise men willing to carry signs just like this--and carry more too than just signs. Besides, fear and hate would be kissin' cousins, if kissin' wasn't exactly the wrong word. Christianity has a history of repression, which it likely should, given the Ten Commandments. That history is also full of hate--and blood.

I'm sure this man thinks he is loved. I'm sure he wants to think he's loving "homos" too.

But for the record, let it be said that I no longer believe Margaret Atwood was fanciful. I'm no longer convinced she was unconvincing.

Netherlandish Proverbs (iii)

The only Dutch aphorism I know I heard from an old friend, a preacher/philosopher who grew up on the Rosebud reservation at the turn of the 20th century. He's been gone for years, but the darling little witticism he tossed out, in Dutch, has stayed with me. 

True to human form, it's not just sinless muttering. There's a spot of envy in it, and envy is one of the Seven Deadlies. I haven't a clue about the context in which he used it, but it's not the application that's memorable; it's the image itself, the perfectly Brueghel-like picture it paints: Hij ist mit zijn gat in de boter gefallen, which, translated, means "He has fallen with his butt in the butter. (I think I've got the spelling right.) No copyright exists that I know of, so if it fits the occasion, feel free to pass it along without attribution. 

Here's three of Breughel's moralisms from the far lower left corner. 

One is a man dressed in blue and clinging to what once was (but is no more) a pillar. On first glance, I guessed something related to an eager beaver--after all, on top of the broken pillar is a hat--maybe a beaver hat, then greatly popular? What's more, he's attacking the thing, gnawing it as if to bring it down (even though it's already been brought low). 

If you're quicker than I am, you may have guessed that once upon a time that pillar stood at the entrance to a church (Brueghel's religious preferences remain a mystery, by the way). So he's clinging to something broken from a church, even taking sustenance from it (Brueghel is having fun, after all). Maybe that helps. In Dutch, the idiot was called or named "een pilaarbijter," easily translated as a "pillar biter." But what on earth does that mean? 

Real Dutch scholars claim "a pillar biter" was a religious hypocrite, someone who clung to the church perhaps, but didn't really believe or practice what the church taught? Een pilaarbijter.

At the bottom of this cut out is a woman, in red, who appears to be looking out elsewhere or asking for help in holding down what appears to be a naked man she's got wound in some kind of straight-jacket. Clearly, she's holding her own, but clearly she's not as sure as she'd like to be.

What's central to understanding this one is something most 21st century viewers would discern: the naked fellow isn't just any hapless gent--it's the Prince of Darkness, Satan himself. I'm not sure how I should have known that, but real art scholars make the claim that this little incident proclaims what 16th century Dutch and Flemish folks would have understood as "De duivel op het kussen binden."  Kussen is a pillow--that red shell she's pinned him to. So, the meaning goes something like this: She's pinned the Devil to a pillow, which suggests something impossible, something which can be accomplished only by almost inhuman obstinacy. 

I'm guessing a line like that is not necessarily spoken in sheer awe--and not necessarily in a kindly way: She's so bull-headed she can wrestle the devil. Maybe that's it, or something akin.

The woman at the top of the cut out appears to be a servant carrying out some kind of task. Whatever it is, she makes me smile. In one hand, she carries burning coal in a blacksmith's tongs, in the other a pretty significant bucket of water. Geloof niet iemand die in de ene hand water an de andere hand vuur dragt--that's what's at the heart of things here, a line which brutishly translated means "don't trust people who carry water in one hand and fire in the other," which is a warning about people who, with nary a pinch of guilt, tell two wholly different stories. 

In August of this year, the Washington Post had documented more than 12,000 from you-know-who. Just sayin'. Brueghel's Netherlandisch Proverbs was done 400 years BT (before Trump). Brueghel could not have dreamed of a man with orange hair who's taken over the world stage. 

What he knew, however, was a wisdom book of Dutch proverbs, some of which haven't lost a bit of their currency in all that time.

Small Wonders--Suckow Park, Earlville

One of the cement plates standing in the park holds an image the house she lived in here in Earlville, a little white house long gone, although things likely haven't changed much in the small town where Iowa novelist Ruth Suckow once lived. Today, what's there is a little commemorative park someone keeps up. Doesn't require much, I suppose. 

An old-fashioned merry-go-round sits just beyond the picnic tables, the kind of thing that scared me, long ago, when I was a boy, and some big kid would push and push and push until we'd sail around so fast I started to believe that if I didn't fly off, my stomach would. 

There's almost nothing of a path around it, where a perfect circle of deep ruts ran around the one in the park I remember. Not so here. It looks unused.

Behind it, barely visible, is an old pump just waiting to find its way into a lawsuit. It might well have been the very pump Ruth Suckow used to get water a century ago on this street, in this place. 

Here it is. There's no handle. To say the poor thing is useless seems somehow unfeeling. Once upon time it had identity. Today it's a stubborn, iron thing city workers might just as well jerk from the well beneath it. 

The Ruth Suckow park reminds me of a Suckow story that nobody who's reading this ever read or heard of--"Home-coming." It's about a woman named Bess Gould, who'd grown up in a town named Fairhope and returned for a reunion of first settlers, having been gone for most of her life. In a way, the whole story is here in the Ruth Suckow Park, Earlville, Iowa.

"Home-coming" exquisitely captures the bittersweetness when childhood reminiscences return in lingering pastels. At first, Bess is delighted, lost in the unending parade of old-timers, each of whom prompts a memory she can't help but think might otherwise have been lost. 

Then, unexpectedly, she runs her "old flame," Charlie, a man no longer the young man without whom she once could not have imagined her life--or any life at all. For a time, Bess moves almost hopelessly back in time to a homecoming meeting that is something she hadn't planned or anticipated. 

Charlie's wife happens to be gone, which conveniently gives Ruth Suckow some space to develop what it is she wants to examine: the sheer delight of nostalgia; even more, the near impossibility of ever really forgetting first love. Bess is drawn back into a blessed childhood relationship completely and forever gone. And she knows it. But she loves it, relives it with equal doses of childhood joy and adult sadness. She knows it's all fantasy. 

But she also knows that those childhood memories are hers alone and therefore somehow sacred. Fairhope has not forgotten the initial chapters of Bess Gould's life--including her childhood Charlie; and all of that is something her loving husband will never know or understand. "She felt lost and all alone," Suckow says at the end of the story, "and her heart was wildly begging [her husband] to come. . . ."Take me away with you," she demands of him in the dream she creates in her mind. "Be everything. Make it up to me. Don't let me die away from home." 

"Home-coming" ends with Bess's painful assertion that she is not home in Fairhope, even though something very close to the heart of who she is and will always be quite magically remains along the crick where she and Charlie fished for minnows. Childhood Fairhope is a blessing and a treasure no one else knows, not even her husband. 

But, how does one care for a precious thing no one else will ever know? 

In Earlville, Iowa, Ruth Suckow's little park reminds me of that story somehow, and of Ruth Suckow herself. To sit at one of those picnic tables felt like a "home-coming," even though I'd never been there before. It was a return to Suckow's small-town Midwest realities, most of which have lost their savor among today's reading public. H. L. Mencken, her first editor, claimed to discover her and was first to publish her stories. For a decade or more, she was a Book-of-the-Month Club star, even anthologized.

But that glory is gone now. What's left is a little park in Earlville, Iowa, and, here and there perhaps, a copy of a novel or two. Aficionados like me can still sit right here on a bench on a warm summer day and read a story or two or three or four--maybe more, right here where she drew water a century ago.

Even though I'd guess I'd be alone if I did, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be a joy. 

Here's the Suckow story as her park tells it:

"Ruth Suckow loved the Iowa countryside near this site. The rolling farmlands, woods, streams, and wildflowers. She called the little house that stood here, "My house." Ruth was unknown when she came to Earlville in 1920. By 1926, she had published two novels and many short stories and was recognized in this country and abroad as the author of a fresh kind of realism. Her work tells in rich detail the life of middle-western communities in the earlier part of the 20th century. The family gatherings, church suppers, holiday celebrations, school commencements. Born in Hawarden, Iowa, on August 6, 1892, Ruth died in Claremont, California, January 25, 1960.

It's not a very big park. But then, neither was the lot, I suppose. Still, it was good to sit there for a time, sit and think through the kinds of thoughts that can't be shuffled quickly through, thoughts of numbering our days.

If you're coming across Iowa, it's two minutes off Highway 20. Won't cost you much time. Who knows? You might like it. Might even like her.

'Do me a favor. If you stop, give that merry-go-round a spin, okay? Put some ruts in that thick grass. Make the place look lived in.  That'd be nice.

Reading Mother Teresa--Holy Fool

“I remember the devotion of your youth, 

how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, 

through a land not sown.” Jeremiah 2:2 

She was just 19 years old when, after six-weeks aboard a passenger ship, she started up the River Ganges, the “Holy River,” into Bengal, and met, along with the others, her “Indian sisters.” Then, in the convent chapel, together, she says, they “thanked our dear Saviour for this great grace that He had so safely brought us to the goal for which we had been longing” (17).

To her friends and family back home, she wrote, “Pray much for us that we may be good and courageous missionaries” (17).

Sister Teresa was only 19 years old, no different from the students in the chairs in my own classrooms, the very ones who text their friends the moment they shut their books; but she was ready to give her life away as a missionary for our Lord. At that moment, she had to be filled with equal measures of fear and conviction. She had to be, at that moment, near unto God. What she could not have known was how near.

She thought she knew what she would be – “a good and courageous missionary.” But in reality she knew next to nothing of what she would become, even less about the squalid world she was about to discover, a world overflowing with the desperation of children she would touch.

At that moment, her youth, idealism, and blind faith carried her triumphantly into a fray she didn’t know was there. She could have had no clue that her selflessness, her righteous dedication to the poor of Calcutta would, in time, establish for her a place among the most revered heroes of this world, a saint. She had little more than a child’s sense of what God almighty had in store for her. Really, she knew nothing at all.

In this complex world of ours, naiveté can sometimes prove a blessing. A young church down the block is filled with the Spirit these days, sure as anything that they’ve embarked on a crusade that is like none other in the community. They’re going to do things right; as a fellowship, they’re not going to be overrun by tradition or the way it’s always been. They’re the new Reformation.

It’s not rhetoric. It’s a mission they believe of themselves.

I’m older and tons less sure. It won't be long and someone what get angry. There will be divisions. Comes with the territory of our humanness.

But there’s something to be said about child-like dreams, of innocence and daring, something to be envied in a real holy fool.

Mother Teresa’s bravado as she takes her first baby steps into her ministry, given what little she really knew of what was to come, is downright astounding. But even more amazing is the grace that crowned her, even as a 19-year-old girl.

Just north of Pierre

That's President John F. Kennedy. It's August 17, 1962, one of the few times JFK ever stepped foot in South Dakota. That day he had reason, good reason. The celebration that drew him was the dedication of the huge Oahe Dam, an earthen monster that created, upstream behind it, the fourth largest man-made reservoir in the world. 

Seven mighty turbines create electricity sufficient to power entire regions of the country. This beast stands 245 feet above river bottom and required 92 million cubic yards of fill dirt, and well over a million cubic yards of concrete. Don't even try to imagine that kind of bulk in quantity. 

Lake Oahe added 2, 250 miles of lakeshore real estate to South Dakota's otherwise paltry sum, not to mention 51 state-run recreation areas and gadzillions of salmon and lake trout. Fishermen have followed, loads of them, competitions just about every weekend. Oh, and water for farmers and ranchers, water in abundance in a region where average rainfall may wander, year to year, painfully. Lake Oahe starts right there, just a few miles north of Pierre, but spreads all the way into North Dakota, a huge, veritable wonder of the world. 

Right up there on top--you have to look to find it--is a chapel, not large, but well-kept. Take a step in--it's nicely furnished with pews and pulpit, decorated thoughtfully in proper church-ly furnishings of the time. A Congregationalist preacher named Thomas Riggs and his wife, Nina, built it, determined to start a mission among the Native people of central South Dakota--and a school, too, where students could be taught to read and write in a grammar book created by Riggs' father, Stephen, who had, already in the 1830s, undertaken mission work among the Dakota out east in Minnesota. 

Why the powers-that-be named that mammoth earthen dam after a tiny little church the lake displaced is a question I can't answer but may well reflect more than a little white privilege. The story goes that a visitor to the Cheyenne River once remarked on the fact that there seemed to be no old people around. Some wise man or woman told the visitor that most had died of a broken heart, so much of their lives and their history simply gone beneath the waters of Lake Oahe.

Anyway, you can miss the chapel with all that wide-open beauty around the dam, but don't. You can honor the whole Riggs family by stopping by and poking your head in. "Bringing in the sheaves" on South Dakota reservation land was a lot tougher work than some of the old missionary hymns had made it sound. 

And then there's this too. Promise me you'll not miss it. It's just a few miles south.

The Snake Butte Turtle Effigy is neither stunning, like the Oahe Dam, nor quaint, like Oahe chapel; and it has absolutely nothing to do with displacing water or land. It sits up top one of a hundred river bluff promontories, and, trust me, you've got to hunt to find it. It's little more than a box of rocks in a chain-link fence. 

But those rocks have a shape, a turtle shape that's here roughly visible.

Let me help.

Those are my lines, and just over the hill is the Missouri River valley. Right now you're standing on private land. No problem--the good people who own the land like to share the Snake Butte Turtle Effigy. 

Age?--who knows? Origin is just as mysterious, although historians do prefer one wonderful saga. Let's just go with it. 

Once upon a time many hundreds of years ago, an Arikara village stood somewhere close to where the dam now stands. The Arikaras were in constant danger of a Dakota attack, so they posted sentries up on promontories like Snake Butte to keep an eye open for war parties. The Dakotas were as stealthy as they were dangerous. So when that young Arikara warrior spotted the sneaky Dakotas, they were already close enough to let loose a fusillade of arrows, one of which caught the young warrior mortally. 

His wound was deep and dangerous, but his people's safety was his only concern. With every ounce of strength and perseverance, he ran and ran and ran, a half-mile, a mile?--distance doesn't matter here, bravery does. Right here, at the edge of the butte, he fell and died, leaving behind a trail of blood.

The Dakota warriors had far more respect for courage than they had for the Arikara, and what they'd witnessed in the kid's frantic determination to warn his village was a miracle of selflessness that stunned them so profoundly that after marking whatever blood spots they could in the grass the kid had traversed, they sat down and created this turtle effigy at the spot where he died, to honor him and his immense and dogged courage.

Whatever you do, don't miss the Turtle Effigy. It may well be the only memorial you'll ever find anywhere created to honor a story of the courage of an enemy. That's almost biblical.

"The Passing of the Backhouse"

That of the famous jokester Will Rogers

Course, yes--but in its country way sort of grudgingly cute, too. Sort of. I didn't grow up anywhere near a privy, so I can't say what's in this goofy doggerel is in any way nostalgic. The poem--if it can be called such--came to me in an ancient unmarked envelope and shouldn't really be reprinted. 

That being said, I had to smile when I read it, and that's why I'm passing it along. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.

When memory keeps me company and moves to smiles or tears, 
a weather-beaten object looms through the mist of years.
Behind the house and barn it stood, a good half-mile or more,
and hurrying feet a path had made, straight to its swinging door.
Its architecture was a type of simple classic art,
But in the tragedy of life it played a leading part.
And oft the passing traveler drove slow and heaved a sigh,
To see the modest hired girl slip out with glances shy.

We had our posey garden that the women loved so well,
I loved it too, but better still I loved the stronger smell
that filled the evening breezes so full of homely cheer,
and told the night-o'ertaken tramp that human life was near.

On lazy August afternoons, it made a little bower
Delightful, where my grandsire sat to while away an hour,
For there the summer morning its very cares entwined,
and berry bushes reddened in the steaming soil behind.

All day fat spiders spun their webs to catch the buzzing flies
that flitted to and fro from the house, where Ma was baking pies.
And once a swarm of hornets bold, had build a palace there,
and stung my unsuspecting aunt--I must not tell you where.
Then father took a flaming pole--that was a happy day!--
he nearly burned the building up, but the hornets left to stay.
When summer bloom began to fade and winter to carouse
We banked the little building with a heap of hemlock boughs.

But when the crust was on the snow and sullen skies were gray,
in sootoh the building was no place where one could wish to stay.
We did our duties promptly, there one purpose swayed the mind.
We tarried not, nor lingered long on what we left behind.
The torture of that icy seat would make a Spartan sob,
for needs must scrape the goose-flesh with a lacerating cob--
that from a frost-encrusted nail was suspended by a string
For father was a frugal man and wasted not a thing.

When grandpa had to "go out back" and make his morning call,
we'd bundle up the dear old man with muffler and a shawl.
I knew the hole on which he sat--'twas padded all around;
and once I dared to sit there--'twas all too wide I found.
They had to come and get me out, or I'd have passed away.
Then father said ambition was a thing that boys should shun,
and I just need the children's hole 'till childhood days were done.

And still I marvel at the craft that cut those holes so true,
the baby hole, and the slender hold that fitted sister Sue;
That dear old country landmark, I tramped around a bit,
And in the lap of luxury my lot has been to sit.
But ere I die I'll eat the fruit of trees robbed of yore,
Then seek the shanty where my name is carved upon the door.
I ween the old familiar smell will soothe my jaded soul,
I'm now a man, but nonetheless, I'll try the children's hole.