Anne Frank, Amsterdam

Yup, that's a no-camera icon in the upper right hand corner, but those bright spots aren't the reflection of a flash. I snapped this without a flash, but I snapped it nonetheless because I just had to take a picture of the actual diary of Anne Frank, the very book she kept. Me and tons of others, by the way. The actual diary of Anne Frank is not sacred, but somehow it's hard to believe that the manuscript itself is not alive.

It's not difficult to determine just why the crowds outside the Anne Frank House are so long, even though the first edition of her diary came out so long ago, in 1947. The Anne Frank story is a love story--love of life at least--and it's lined up against a gargantuan human tragedy and horror: a girl, barely more than a child, goes to war in her own way against Nazi jackboots. She dies, after an immense fight, but Hitler loses when the girl who dies wins, big time.

What is difficult, even today, is to get one's mind around what Hitler actually did. Have a look at the plans for Auschwitz someday. Look closely. It's an immense engineering and construction project, undertaken by hundreds, if not thousands of workers of all kinds, all of designed for one sure-as-death purpose, to kill, to exterminate.  Exterminate is what one does to roaches, to grease ants, to whatever unwelcome bug one finds in a cupboard. We exterminate.

How on earth could people sign up to construct such a place? They had to know. So many simply drank the kool-aid.

Just one of the 100,000 Dutch Jews who never returned from the camps in Germany was a slight, dark-haired child who grew up in "the annex," the hiding place behind her father's factory, where she hid with her family, hoping to outlive the war.

Someone turned them in--the entire Frank family. Even today no one knows who. Only the father returned from the camps after the war, and then was he given the diary Anne Frank kept by a woman named Miep Gees, who'd been one of the righteous Gentiles to help the Frank family.

Mr. Frank said he couldn't believe his daughter had written what she did, as if the daughter on the pages of that diary was someone other than the daughter he thought he knew, having lived in that cramped upstairs hiding place for as long a time as they had. It was as if some other young woman had been set loose on those pages.

Maybe it was another girl. "The nicest thing about writing down all my thoughts and feelings," this child wrote, "is that otherwise I'd suffocate."

Writing in her diary was therapy for her, but it's been much more for the hundreds who, once again, line up in front of that otherwise indistinguishable Amsterdam address every day, children and old men and women, families, singles, every color of skin imaginable, all to visit Anne's secret annex.

She could never have known, never have guessed that her diary would become one of the world's best sellers. When I visited there, that upstairs attic seemed just as crowded as it must have felt for her before the Nazis came one morning  and the Frank family was shipped out to Westerbork, then, finally, Germany. 

"How wonderful it is," Anne Frank wrote in that diary, "that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

Maybe the most beautiful thing I saw in the Netherlands on my last trip there was a room where a girl dreamed of blue skies and a walk in a park and yet told the rest of us how much she hoped we were loving what she couldn't. Hers was the darkest days of Dutch history, not the Golden Age.

William of Orange is more important to Dutch history, but Anne Frank is the very heart of the human story.

I know exactly how I'd like to be, how I am...on the inside [...] I'm guided by the pure Anne on the inside, but outside I'm nothing but a frolicsome little goat tugging at its tether [...]  If I'm being completely honest, I'll have to admit that it does matter to me, that I'm trying very hard to change myself, but that I'm always up against a more powerful enemy [...] if I'm quiet and serious, everyone thinks I'm putting on a new act and I have to save myself with a joke [...] I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if ... there were no other people in the world.

Yours, Anne M. Frank.

On July 31, 1944, 76 years ago, Ms. Anne Frank, once again, poured out her heart in these words, the very last words of that most famous--because most human--diary.

Understanding Louie

For some of us, it's tough to understand Louie Gohmert, a man so opposed to face masks that when finally he absolutely had to wear one, he blamed the mask when he tested positive for the virus. His explanation was perfectly mad, as nuts as his adamant refusal to wear one: the mask did it.

The political divide in this country is as great--maybe greater--than it was in the late 60s.

What creates Louie Gohmerts is not just blind loyalty to the President of the United States, but a view of the shape of things in this nation the POTUS touts. Whether Trump believes is a good question I can't answer. Louie does.

This lament got into my in-box not long ago. I don't believe it's meant to be deadly serious; then again it didn't leave me in stitches. Let me share a few of its abundant tears.

I Used To Be A Normal Person

  

As an American, I used to think I was pretty much just a regular person, but I was born white, into a two-parent household which now, whether I like it or not, makes me “Privileged",  a racist & responsible for slavery…

 

I am a fiscal & moral conservative, which by today's standards, makes me a fascist because I plan, budget & support myself.

  

I went to High School, & have always held a job.  But I now find out that I didn’t get my job because I earned it, but because I was "advantaged”.

 

I am heterosexual, which according to "gay" folks, now makes me a homophobe.

I don't share those attitudes, but I understand the feelings--I get the program. I am, after all, old and white and male. Me and the whoever wrote this or passed it along got things in common.

I believe in the 2nd Amendment, which makes me a de facto member of the "vast NRA gun lobby”

  

I am older than 60, making me a useless eater who doesn't understand Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.

I'm not sure what a "useless eater" is. Maybe it's a typo. But other than that?--sure! Technology confusing? Shoot, I could add a half dozen others to that meager list.

  

I am proud of my heritage & our inclusive American culture, making me a xenophobe.

He knows how to make music from a dog whistle.

  

I am proud of our flag, what it stands for and the many who died to let it fly, so I stand & salute during our National Anthem - so I must be a racist. 

There's got to be a place in this litany for Black Lives Matter, which, here, is very clearly not said. 

Funny - it all took place over the last few years! If all this nonsense wasn't enough to deal with, now I don't even know which restroom to use… and I gotta go more FREQUENTLY!

Cute. And as someone who, since hitting the sack last night, has stood before the throne three times--and will again before breakfast, I'm sure--I get it. Cute last line. I'm giggling.

Sort of.

The reservation system was devastating to the Lakota nation and to Native people everywhere because it brought changes so immense and irreversible that, in one fell swoop, those reservations destroyed a culture and a way of life, leaving men and women purposeless and powerless.

Can't help but wonder whether a similar phenomenon is happening today to white men like Louie, who's always been "advantaged." 

It's time for him to share power; right now, time to don the mask.

Big Bluestem

Big bluestem.

Big, big, big bluestem.

Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and spindly, it grew up every  summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt, a thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Bluestem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But the skinny stem doesn't break, it just waves, waves away, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea. 

You can still find it dancing here and there in restored prairie or in forgotten corners of the country too steep or crooked to take a plow. You can pick up a bunch from a garden shop and

plant it in your own backyard. Don't worry--it'll take. It does most anywhere. It's not picky. In fact, people who know such things claim it can still get aggressive if you let it alone somewhere, if you just let it be. A half acre maybe. Maybe more.

But here’s the thing: big bluestem waves out gorgeous tributes, but it doesn't make for great pasture. Those who know say cattle love it too darn much--some ranchers call it "ice cream for cows." Way back when, big bluestem suited crowds of buffalo just fine, but they were smart enough to graze only every other year or so because big bluestem won't stand up to constant grazing.

Some call Big Blue "turkey foot" for the three-pronged head it grows up top like a little joke
late summer. It's especially beautiful this time of year--late summer to fall--when it takes on its own royal robe: those long stems burn nicely into purple--and amber once the snow flies. But the truth is, beauty in native prairie is an acquired taste. Trust me, it can be as fancy as a flower shop, but it'll never be in a greenhouse. There are no hybrids, just a colorful bunch of old friends happy to be around together.

Wouldn't hurt us to remember that we'll be indebted to big bluestem for a long, long time because it once stood all around and grew remarkable roots four or five feet deep, deep and heavy roots that created our own rich prairie sod. 

The poet William Cullen Bryant once described riding through the big bluestem prairie our world once was:

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound.   

Still not convinced? How about Walt Whitman, who wanted like nothing else to be "America's poet." Listen to him from "Specimen Days":

As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.

Let me remind you that right here in this passage, Walt Whitman is talking about home. 

Ours.

No middle ground

It's like Trump himself. You can think it's either the most contemptuous idiocy ever brushed out on canvas, or you can weep pious tears for a country so riven by politics that only prayer will ever bring us back. You can think what's here is nutty, hilarious, or be brought to your knees at the idea of all those American saints blessing the Pres. If you confess the name of Trump, this is a triumph. If you believe him the very face of evil, you'll push the painting through your printer, burn it on your desk, photograph the flames, and post it on Twitter. 

That's Reagan on his left, Frederick Douglas on his right. Lincoln's back there, and Ike and JFK, not to mention half the cast of Hamilton--Washington, Jefferson. I think the tall guy on the far right is Billy Graham, but I could be mistaken; and, closest to the window, that's Robert E Lee next to MLK, all of them laying on hands, blessing our POTUS as he sits reverently at his desk, in prayer, the Declaration of Independence before him, along with that same Bible ("a Bible" not his) he toted across the street to the church for a photo op. And keys. I suppose to the nation itself. 

It's almost impossible not to care about the image at the top of the page. You love it or hate it. It moves you to tears or wrath. It's either a sermon for the nation or sheer idiocy. 

What the American electorate has never seen is that Donald Trump, a man humble enough to beg for divine help, a man with his hands folded to keep them from reaching, bowed head, eyes closed. I can't imagine he doesn't pray when his spiritual leaders are around, but he actually seems another person altogether than the man who just yesterday told newsmen he'd declined the invitation to throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, something he'd never been asked to do, a man who fabricates so much to twist reality into something self-serving. Next thing you know, one of his disciples will publish "The Piety of Donald Trump."

And yet, if you're a believer, you can't really not wish for something like this, dedicated prayer to make the POTUS a compassionate leader of this nation. Lincoln may well stand around the oval office himself these days, hoping--urging--Trump to be a better human being. If you love this amazing McLaughlin painting--one of several similar--what's here is exactly what you pray for. If this image moves you, you're in the painting yourself.

Art, some say, is allusive, suggestive--it requires our participation. Frederick Manfred used to say stories--like art itself--are C's, not O's. Art is never a closed circle; there's always a gap because great art requires our participation. We fill in the open space. 

There's an open space in this McNaughton painting all right. The painting is like the President himself: you either love him or hate him. There just ain't no middle ground.

Anachronism

Gotta' love this. 

A friend sent it to me, along with some other oldies. I think you could study it all day and not have a clue. If you're wondering, she's an alarm clock, heavy-set maybe, but, I'm guessing, accurate. Long before your and my domiciles got wired, she'd go up and down streets with that single-shot pea-shooter, cracking peas off your window to wake those she must have been contracted to so do. Don't know what the job paid, but this professional doesn't look to be suffering. So long as you didn't have to shake the sleepers by hand, you could stay a long ways away from any untoward contact. Just had to be on time. Just had to smack the window

Got me to thinking about professions; and when I did, I couldn't help thinking that I'm descended from a long line of anachronisms.

My great-grandpa Schaap was a sailor in Holland and a farmer in America, but then, he reasoned (as did thousands of others), "who couldn't farm?" Well, he couldn't. But he didn't know that when he came. He simply assumed that if he had some land somewhere in America, he could live well. Farmers aren't rare in my neighborhood; we have a lot of them today, but his kind are long gone. Old McDonald is long gone. My great-grandpa had some trouble making it with subsistence farming; he'd have been marched off the land by agribusiness.

Ended up just down the road, owning a clothing store. Could have as well been a tailor--no more work for tailors either. I have no reason to believe he died a pauper, either in coin or in spirit; but there was no way he wintered in Florida. Do you know anyone who owns a mens clothing store these days?

My great-grandpa on my mother's side, was, like his father before him, a blacksmith. We've got a 106-year old picture up on our library wall, one of those long wonderful wide-angled shots of an entire city park full of people lined up for a portrait.




Let me bring you in closer to see who these folks are.




Among them are my great-grandparents, as well as my grandparents. They're horseshoers, a word the spell-check doesn't even recognize. They don't call themselves blacksmiths; they're horseshoers. Look at them all--a couple hundred at least. I'm guessing Sheboygan County is lucky if there's one today. If there's no farmwork, horses don't do much but look pretty and eat a bale of hay a day. No horses, no shoes.

Can't help but think that someday some great-great-grandchild of mine will look at a picture of an odd-looking gent standing in front of a blackboard--"what is that?"-- and asking some ancient grandma what this guy was doing exactly. "He was a teacher," I hope someone will answer.

"And what did he teach?"

"Literature."

"What's 'literature'?

Last year, a college down the road gutted its English department for what the administration understood to be a good reason--there were no majors. The high cost of higher education pushes students into professional training these days, and who, pray tell, ever repaid a loan on the money earned from writing a poem? "The written word is a poor sluggish traveler in a high-velocity time, an ancient clumsy makeshift tool, invented by people who worked in clay and moved at the speed of a camel," or so says Robert Coover in The American Scholar. He's right.

Like pea shooters, all things must pass, I guess. Me too.

Sigh.

Reading Mother Teresa--Nothing

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, 

neither angels nor demons, 

neither the present nor the future, 

nor any powers, 

neither height nor depth, 

nor anything else in all creation, 

will be able to separate us 

from the love of God 

that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

Romans 8:38–39 

Seriously?

The Apostle Paul’s searing claim is, in some ways, characteristic of the zealot he always was. Absolutely nothing will separate us from God’s love in Christ? Nothing? Seriously?

It may be difficult to locate another single line of scripture that so boldly proclaims the sovereign character of God’s love in this chapter from Paul's letter to the Romans – nothing, absolutely nothing can pull us away from God’s love. Nothing.

The Bible’s poetic character carries along more than its share of hyperbole or overstatement. Give Paul a break here – he’s just really pumped and people sometime say mumble extravagant things when they are way high. Take it with a grain of salt, eh?

My very pious great-great-grandfather came to America in the 1840s, got himself a chunk of land outside a pioneer community called Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Then, in a matter of just a year or so, lost three sons and his wife to some vile, rampaging disease. I’m sure he spoke no English; he was just off the boat, really, a citizen of a brand new, barely understandable world. After suffering that kind of loss, I wonder whether he felt separated from God’s love. Even Job did, after all.

Still, it’s there, isn’t it? – Paul’s bravura. Even if you’ve heard that line only once, it will stick to the memory like eternity. Nothing. Nothing at all can separate us from his love.

When the church finally granted Mother Teresa the calling she claimed Jesus himself demanded of her – to go into the darkest, dankest dens of human suffering in the woeful city around her – Mother Teresa faced a difficult problem: she believed she would have to leave the Order. Part of the call Jesus gave her was to become the poor, not just to be like the poor in their Calcutta hovels, but to be them; and that divine directive meant leaving the Sisters of Loreto and breaking the vows she’d made 18 years before. In order to follow Christ, she would have to undergo a separation the church itself called “secularization.”

But she was resolute.

Nobody can unbind me from God – I am consecrated to Him and as such I desire to die. – I don’t know what the Canon Law has to say in this matter – but I know Our Lord will never allow Himself to be separated from me. – Neither will He allow anyone to separate me from Him. (87)

That’s what she wrote in a letter to her spiritual mentor, that’s the pledge she gave him, not as if to assuage his fear but to proclaim as defiantly as she could that even in reneging on her vows she wasn’t, for a moment, expecting even the slightest separation from the grace she’d always known. She was, in essence, willing to give up the church to follow Christ.

And she meant it. She wasn’t playing politics or plying her superiors to get her way. What she claimed was not hyperbole or poetic license. Like Paul, she was totally convinced, completely convinced, that nothing would separate her from the Love of God, not height nor breadth nor angels nor demons, nor anything else in God’s green earth or some spiritual world. Not death. Not life. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Seriously? 

Seriously!

Locker room talk

What's not in dispute is the facts of the matter. In the middle of a vote on the floor of the House, two members ran into each other on the steps of the Capital. One of them, Rep. Ted Yoho, from Florida, appears to have been livid about the other's remarks during a debate on the violence on the streets of New York. "The other" is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who represents an area of NYC that is rife with crime. On the floor of the House AOC had said, she says, that a rise in petty crime in places like her district may well be occurring because of hard economic times. Obviously, Yoho disagreed. 

Two others were within earshot. One of them was a representative and friend of Yoho, a man with a name of soft heft in American history, Rep. Roger Williams. A reporter from The Hill was there too, sadly for Yoho. Four people heard exactly what Yoho said, but his buddy with the famous name says he wasn't tuned it at the moment--he was thinking about an issue going on in his district. 

It's not hard to guess what happened. Once Yoho heard that a reporter had picked up what he'd said (he called her a "f_____g bitch"), Yoho realized that he'd better do something about a regretful moment in his life that was sure defame to him. He apologized from the floor of the House, something that doesn't happen every day.

He didn't admit to what he said, just that he shouldn't have said it, then ended with some a good solid shot of self-glorification. 

I will commit to each of you that I will conduct myself from a place of passion and understanding that policy and political disagreement be vigorously debated with the knowledge that we approach the problems facing our nation with the betterment with the country in mind and the people we serve. I cannot apologize for my passion or for loving my God, my family and my country.

There's a bit of contrition in that, but more than a few doses of self-aggrandizement.

AOC took exception to what amounted to his personal apology and came to the floor yesterday to offer what might well be the most powerful single speech uttered there throughout the entire term. 

If you haven't listened in, you should. But it's withering. I don't know where Rep. Ted Yoho is this morning, but wherever he is he must be licking his wounds. Her sermon will take you some nine minutes, but it's worth it.

I won't say every, but certainly a lot of men know exactly what she's talking about. Me too. It's even got a name "locker-room talk," which is how Trump's admirers excused his obscene jerkiness on the Accent Hollywood tape. Trump knows very well what she's talking about. Millions do. 

That's why the speech was so powerful. AOC took her own dehumanization and lifted an attitude as widely held as racism--sexism--to a height from which no one in this nation could look away. 

Several years ago now, some network aired a show titled "Men Behaving Badly." Never saw it, so I shouldn't talk about it, but what Rep. Ted Yoho did a few days ago on the steps of the Capital, AND what he did in his flaccid apology to AOC, was demonstrate exactly what that line means. 

It's almost impossible for most men not to feel the wounds Ted Soho has to be feeling this morning. The man's a vet. I'm guessing he wouldn't treat a dog the way he treated her, even a female dog. If you don't feel the pain this morning, wonderful; but AOC's remarkable criticism was amazing because every word of it was true.

Houses of worship

You can only imagine the power and beauty of the music from this massive pipe organ, or, for that matter, the sheer spectacle of worship in the church it's in--a cathedral in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

I really do love cathedrals, the massive ones like throughout Europe, but also the big ones here in the States, like this one in St. Paul. I was raised a full-bore Protestant, but when I step into Roman Catholic churches, my breath stops, almost always, even the ones much smaller, like this one in rural South Dakota, the Cathedral of the Prairie. 

Or this one in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.

I am a catholic, ultimately--or at least I confess to being one every Sunday in church--"I believe in the holy catholic church, the communion of saints. . ." But I was baptized in a Protestant church in the Calvinist tradition that looked much more like this:

Few accouterments, no relics, no chandeliers, no altar, hardly stunning. 

No matter. Last week I read about a Wesleyan church in Seneca Falls, New York. This place. Nary a panel of stained glass, nothing but bare walls, not a sculpture in sight. 

On July 19, 1848, the first suffragette conference was held here. Most of the attendees were Quakers and abolitionists; all of them were fiery advocates for women's rights, among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 

The story goes that when Ms. Stanton showed up, there were more than a few men and women milling around outside in the July heat. The church was locked and no one had a key. The heat was stifling, and no one--needless to say--was wearing shorts. It was 1848, and the Civil War was still a ways down the road. 

But these women were not to be denied, so some of them hoisted a 12-year-old boy up off the ground high enough to crawl through a window to open the place up. At least they could sit down and turn on the AC. Well, at least they could sit down. 

It's a church. It's not a cathedral. But like Amsterdam's Westerkerk, the Wesleyan Church of Senaca Falls today is a national monument. What began here in this plain house of worship changed the world. 

The God we worship is never as small as we'd like to make Him.

Grace in the Waiting Room

At the Cancer Clinic
by Ted Kooser

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

She is not elderly. The young woman on stage in this Ted Kooser poem is being helped along by her sisters, both of them young, he says, suggesting she is too. That she is not elderly sharpens the sadness. Cancer seems most villainous when it chooses the young. 

I'd like to think that she may recover, but nothing in the poem suggests it. For her, it's a "great distance" to the examining room. She's slumped; her sisters  bend "to the weight of an arm," while that nurse in her white smock calls "encouragement." Her life is in danger.

The miracle of very real situation is that "There is no restlessness or impatience/or anger anywhere in sight," so decidedly different is what we're seeing from what we witness so regularly in the rest of the world. What's here in the waiting room is grace, Kooser says, gifts flowing from all directions--nothing less hard to find than love itself.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit," Jesus said, the first of the beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Her case looks dire. I don't think Kooser sees this young cancer patient recovering. The woman in "her funny knit cap" is anything but arrogant.

But that doesn't mean that what Mr. Koozer witnessed one day "at the cancer clinic" is horror. What he sees is a testimony of grace so visible that the waiting room, just for a moment, is stunned by the rare beauty of sheer selflessness.

Today, we're in the middle of an epidemic ravishing families around the world, tens of thousands of ERs crowded with pestilence, so many--too many--people dying alone. Here in the U. S. daily deaths are right now, once again, exceeding a thousand a week.

But this too. Every day, every hour, every minute--someone with "the straight, tough bearing of courage" is helping someone, even those of us who are cancer free, towards the open door of the kingdom of heaven. 

Giving is one of those rare gifts that gives on giving. Ted Koozer's poem takes note of grace, and that's a blessing for which I'm thankful this morning.

Morning Thanks--Mealtime

My first thought? My goodness, they're almost grown up--why do they act like kids? There's bird seed scattered all around them, but no, they need Mom to feed them? C'mon. Get a life.

I was standing behind a window at meal time. I didn't break up the ritual, and it went on and on because it wasn't not just a snack they were getting. Those kiddos were famished--and there were three of them, not just two. 

So Mom was busy. Her beggar brood was not easily or quickly satisfied. 

But then, it's what she does, I thought--she feeds her kids. Supper isn't some pastime. 

They would not be silenced. They were hungry, so all during the meal a madness of hooting and hollering came up from whomever wasn't being served. Frantic appeals, too, as if were they not to be fed, they'd toss themselves off the edge of the table and into oblivion. Mom had to work. Nobody ever claimed raising kids was a piece of cake.

And it's not just a ritual either. It's a job. You get pooped. You pick out the goods with your beak, choose your target, and just to make sure the kid doesn't spit it up or out, you deposit supper somewhere close to their belly buttons, make sure it gets there.

Now just look at the size of that kid's feet, for pete's sake. You can't help but think he or she ought to be scarfing down his own food, don't you? Had the four posed for a family portrait, had they stood there together like a bowling team, I wouldn't have been able to distinguish mother from child. 

Grow up. My word. You know?

Don't buy the bravado I'm spewing. I wasn't thinking about those kids being lazy. In truth, I was telling myself what an odd thing it is to be retired, to be so unbusy that you sit for a while and watch grace tease out a supper and can't help but think it's just the best thing you've seen all day. 

I'm thinking it's not a bad thing to keep your eyes on the sparrows in the backyard, not a bad thing at all. How could it be? This morning I'm thankful for being at a meal just outside my back door. I wasn't invited, but the whole thing was somehow it's own kind of sacrament.

Small Wonder(s) -- Crescent Hotel, Eureka Springs

[This morning's "Small Wonder," to be aired on KWIT, 90.3, NPR in Sioux City, Iowa. Tell your smart speaker to listen in at 7:45 a.m. or 4:45 p.m. (or thereabouts). I thought they'd hold it for Halloween, but it's time has come.]

If you look closely into a single, little nook, a tiny corner of the elegant, spirit-riddled Crescent Hotel, Eureka Springs, Arkansas, you'll see an arc, I’m told, a portal that’ll usher you right into the fifth dimension. I walked fearfully through the place.

“Look closely because at this very spot it frequently appears,” our guide told us. She jerked her arm sideways, in a motion I simply assumed was conjuration, and I took the picture.

Here it is. You got to look hard, worse than hard.

The Crescent Hotel is an ancient, five-story, behemoth, built in 1886, a creaking-stairway hotel that has every reason to be haunted. It's seen more booms and busts than a brothel, and likely was one at least once in its checkered 135-year history. It's been most everything else in fact, including a hospital, of sorts, when, in 1937, an Iowa charlatan/crook named Norman Baker moved his medical humbug from Muscatine to Eureka Springs, to take over the sprawling old hotel and create a reign of medical tomfoolery that lasted just three years until Arkansas tossed him in the clink for mail fraud.

Somewhere in the hotel basement, there reportedly was a morgue. Baker took on dying people and their loved ones by the dozens, even hundreds, promising miracle cures that never arrived, and gathered, in return $4 million himself. That some patients died seems more than possible; he kept no records. Was there a gallery of the dead in the basement? No one knows.

See the ghosts? They’re there all right. Listen closely.

Eureka Springs is itself a monument to delusion and grand, American-style chicanery. Throughout the sharp wooded hills, sweet natural springs abound, where mineral water once bubbled, drawing thousands of seekers to the neighborhood in hopes that drinking that mineral water--sometimes bathing in it--would cure whatever their ills.

And it did. See the ghosts? Look closely now, very closely--that arc is the means by which all of us make it into the fifth dimension.

Eureka Springs is a remarkable place with an incredible history. The scary Crescent Hotel is its capstone, a town officially called "the Queen of the Ozarks." Trust me--if any place on Mother Earth should be haunted, the immense Crescent, high above town, high above the valley, should. Some gloomy midnights, it just has to howl.

If you climb the stairs to the observation deck, you can see, all over the valley, a hundred--at least--Victorian mansions, and at least something of the town that's made it's living by sweet promises.

Across the valley, you won't be able to miss the huge "Christ of the Ozarks," third tallest Jesus in the world, a sculpture so massive it could dangle three cars from each wrist, so big its feet had to be cut off lest its holy head require a red beacon to warn off aircraft. So, this mammoth Jesus has no feet; but then some wry cynics claim the statue is not work of art at all, just Willie Nelson in a fine, white dress.

Eureka Springs is the home of the world's largest passion play, but let me play the cynic: I'm not sure the place is all that good for your faith. There's just way too much of it. Even though thousands come every year to the see "the greatest story ever told," the town has a history of too much silliness, too much fraud.

We're all seekers--every one of us, I’d guess, all looking, some more seriously than others; but all of us itch to find some long-lost goodness, some hope and joy.  

Eureka Spring has been trying for more than a hundred years to scratch that itch.

Room #218. Be sure to stop there, the most haunted room in the whole Poe-like Crescent Hotel. Seriously.

Scary.

But if you want to stay there, you need to book months in advance because #218 is the most requested room in the entire scary place. Sheesh. Makes me shiver.

Reading Mother Teresa--The Wardrobe of the Poor

Through him we received grace and apostleship 

to call all the Gentiles to the obedience 

that comes from faith for his name’s sake. 

And you also are among those Gentiles 

who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. Romans 1:5–6 

“. . . your vocation is to love and suffer and save souls and by taking this step you will fulfill My Heart’s desire for you. . . . You will dress in simple Indian clothes or rather like My Mother dressed – simple and poor.” (48)

Thus saith the Lord. Seriously.

The quote above includes the exact words Mother Teresa claimed she heard Jesus tell her when he, startlingly, directed her to live among the poor, with them, as them. Even in dress. Gone would be the almost sacred habit, in its place the rags of Calcutta’s poor.

Some men my age wear shorts to church these days – you know, the ones with baggy pockets. I can excuse such dress in those 30-somethings who believe that worship should be a picnic. But in older men – those who remember the “Sunday clothes” of their boyhoods – I guess I just don’t understand. I’m no grumpy old fogy, by the way; I haven’t worn a suit for years. But fall is coming, and, sooner or later, I’ll get out a sport coat. No ties, however – good night, I’m not a museum piece.

There are practices with which I was brought up that I find difficult to break – like going to church twice on Sunday. We’ve been “oncers” now for a couple of months, and I rather like it, although I’m still not sure, as my father would say, that what I do with the time I’d otherwise be in church is as important, as selfless as worship.

Someday, when I depart this vale of tears, I’ll still have “Sunday clothes” in the closet. The penchant to dress up for worship is in a vault of my subconscious, for better or for worse. If we had a meeting with our State Senator, my father used to say, we wouldn’t wear swimming suits. Hard as this is to admit, I’ve got a thing about Sunday clothes, a thing that’s not easily broken. But I’m on the other side of the Reformation, and I’m a thorough-going Protestant who grew up, terribly prejudiced, sometimes referring to nuns as penguins.

But what if I wasn’t? What if, to me, the wardrobe of the Lord was the habit that I was born and reared adoring? What if my commitment to Jesus Christ and Mother Mary was quietly proclaimed in the white coif, the black veil, the rosary, the woolen belt, the holy habit and scapular? How hard would it be then, to remove them for something else?

I’m guessing only Christ himself could have persuaded Mother Teresa to change clothes. Only the voice of the Lord as she heard it could have demanded she step out of centuries of Roman Catholic tradition and piety in exchange for the rags of Calcutta’s poor.

And he did, or so she heard him say.

So commanding was his voice, so determined was her obedience. Leave the habit behind, Sister. That’s what he told her.

And she did. That’s something, isn’t it?

Six billion

Let's just start here.

Astronomers at the University of British Columbia claim that we're not alone. That may not come as news, but let me just hit the refresh button on the absolute mind-bending enormity of our world. It's an estimate, of course--no one's been there or conducted a census, but those UBC heaven-gazers make the absurd claim that there may be as many as six billion "earthlike planets" in our galaxy. Let me use the zeros--6,000,000,000 of us. And counting. Six billion. Unimaginable.

They're not talking about random space detritus, stuff left behind. To make the UBC list, a planet was required to be rocky (not just shaving cream), earth-sized, and on an orbit around something akin to our sun. Six. Billion. Of. Us.

Now, I'm no prophet or seer, and I'm not about to argue for E.T., or some zany similar life-toid, but the mere suggestion of there being millions of worlds not unlike our own--no, billions of them--should be enough to settle the graffiti fight recorded in spray paint on the bridge connecting Sioux City to South Sioux (above), the familiar political skirmish we stumbled on a couple days ago. Any white dude who doesn't understand the importance of the affirmation of "BLM" needs to be schooled in America's past. Any white man or woman who feels the urge to one-up "BLM" with a white "ALM" (as witnessed on said bridge) is a bigot. End of sentence.

On the other hand, if there are, in fact, six billion planets not unlike our own, whether or not there's life on any other of them, anyone who says "all life matters" is thereby making a pledge so immense, so heavily faith-filled that the sheer suggestion is holy foolishness.

To believe there is a creator of this enormity, this massive universe of rock-like planets on orbit around a million sun-like stars is nutty. To believe that said Creator loves every last inhabitant of this massive world, white or black or E.T.-type, is a brazen act of crazed faith. Think not? Then start here, with us: there are, hereabouts, 7.8 billion of us aboard this one of ours. ALL LIVES MATTER. Go on--bend your mind around that tally.

Honestly, to truly believe ALM is true is to set a course in this world that's big enough to say "Black Lives Matter" without fingers crossed, without asterisks or footnotes, and certainly without wielding a can of white spray paint. 

To say "ALM" requires humility, compassion, a commitment to serving billions of others. Any other use of that line is criminal. Any other use of that phrase is something we used to call sin.  

"Monkey Mind" and other memories

Monkey Mind

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.

I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

by Steve Orlen, from The Elephant's Child: New and Selected Poems

This poem too--I like it, not because I have some similar memory because I don't. But this morning's Writers Almanac poem opens up the crap shoot that growing up is--really, that life itself is. Who knows what sticks in our minds and souls? Nobody. Nor does anyone know why. Some impressions and perceptions simply don't die. Instead, they knock about in our conscious minds as if they had their own life, more often than not with no particularly understandable cause.

Little more than a week ago--and I wrote it here--I got up early in the morning in an unfamiliar cabin and heard, from my own feet, the sound of my grandfather's slippers shuffling over the kitchen linoleum in our house fifty years ago. My grandfather died when I was six. In what crack or crevice did that impression hide for all those years? And why did it stay? There's nothing particularly untoward about the memory or the man, but the sound was there as if it were yesterday. I felt myself to be my grandpa.

Nothing about his funeral has stayed. I have no memory whatsoever of that event. Or do I? Perhaps some morning, brushing my teeth, some ancient memory will emerge out of whatever ooze holds all these strange impressions and perceptions. Who knows?

In the poem, the issues of a certain childhood event have never really left the narrator's consciousness. What he remembers is being swatted unjustly for typical childhood curiosity, in an equation that, back then, made no particular sense. He's much older today, and presumably he understands his father's reaction way back then; but he's never forgiven his father because, in a way, he can't. The images from that odd event haven't really shifted in shape and design from the day it happened so long ago.

I think of myself as a victim of all of this--judging my own strangely haunting memories. But even more fearfully, I wonder what memories I inflicted on my own children. The old man, after all, probably remembers nothing of the events which haunt the kid--nothing. What don't I know about what I said or did when my children were simply curious--or simply kids? Maybe I'd rather not know.

A mind and its memory is curious thing. And even scary.