"Awe" by Frederick Buechner

I remember seeing a forest of giant redwoods for the first time. There were some small children nearby, giggling and chattering and pushing each other around. Nobody had to tell them to quiet down as we entered. They quieted down all by themselves. Everybody did. You couldn't hear a sound of any kind. It was like coming into a vast, empty room.

Two or three hundred feet high the redwoods stood. You had to crane your neck back as far as it would go to se the leaves at the trop. The trees made their own twilight out of the bright California day. There was a stillness and stateliness about them that seemed to become part of you as you stood there stunned by the sight of them. They had been growing in that place for going on two thousands years. With infinite care, they were growing even now. You could feel them doing it. They made you realize that all your life you had been mistaken. Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elms  you had seen for as long as you could remember, but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a Tree really was.

"Behold the man," Pilate said when he led Jesus out where everybody could see him. He can't have been much to look at after what they'd done to him by then, but my guess is that, even so, there suddenly fell over that mob a silence as awed as ours in the forest when for the first time in their lives they found themselves looking at a Human Being.

______________

from Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith.

Why I can't watch

I find it hard--too hard--to watch the George Floyd trial, so I don't. I turn it off. I have no doubt that Derek Chauvin killed Mr. Floyd, although I'm far less sure that he meant to. All that time--nine minutes and 29 seconds--and all that talk--the crowd insisting on Floyd's distress--make Chauvin's guilt all-too-evident.

The civil case has already made clear where this trial is headed. When a jury awarded Floyd's family more than 20 million dollars, that jury established Chauvin's guilt. 

As one African-American commentator said last night on MSNBC, he won't be surprised if Chauvin is freed: white cops are always exonerated in the deaths of black people.

I get that. Sadly, his generalization is right on the money: white cops do walk away from dead black bodies. But this particular white man thinks that the white cop--Derek Chauvin--killed a black man named George Floyd, and just as what he did was judged as a crime in the civil court, it will be in this nationally televised criminal court as well.

I just wish it was over. "Why can't we all just get along?" to quote another black man victimized by white cops. Racism has existed since 1619 in this country; Trump didn't create the immense fracture that now separates us, but neither did he do anything to heal it. In the process, he only opened it even farther. 

I am greatly thankful that split is not solely a racial divide. What happened last summer in American cities wasn't just a Black protest. Millions of white Americans took to the streets as well. What we're suffering through is a racial divide that is no longer specifically a racial divide because millions of white people have seen what Derek Chauvin did, what black people have suffered at the hands of white cops, and the plain fact that blue lives matter only when they practice justice, only when Black lives matter. Derek Chauvin is looking at serious jail time.

And then there's this. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, by February of this year, "state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states, and 704 bills with provisions that expand voting access in a different set of 43 states." That was six weeks ago. How many since?

Why? Because confusion gone rampant in the 2020 Presidential Election, because some people are convinced--and were for months already before the election--that President Trump's loss meant the election was rigged. Trump preached that doctrine like a tub-thumper, started it before 2016 even. He created the mob that took over the Capital. He nurtured the crooked truth that he couldn't lose. He set his base up for what happened, and when it did--when he lost--millions saw fraud.

What libs like me call "voter suppression" is layered atop the animosity created by Derek Chauvin, Black Lives Matter, and racial discrimination that just won't quit, especially when we are, as a nation, amid dynamic demographic change. "Voter suppression" is yet another issue that's an open wound. Once again, ex-President Donald Trump, who is certainly not responsible for American racism, continues to do what he can to throw gas all over the flames.

Think of this: he could, this morning, call a news conference, gather air time all over the media, and speak to the entire nation. He could have the bully pulpit once again, even though he lost it in the election. He could dominate the news today, tomorrow, and well into next month, if he'd simply stand up and accept the truth that he lost.

Sixty-some courts of law made it clear he did. One of his most active defense lawyers now claims in her own defense that no thoughtful person could have believed the preposterous things she said about voter fraud. Voting machine companies, vilified by Rudy and others and Trump himself, are taking his soothsayers--including Fox News--to court for willful deception.

The ex-President could do more for racial justice and reconciliation in America this very morning, right now, by standing before the American people and just admitting that he lost the Presidential race to Joe Biden. He'd pre-empt the trial.

Don't hold your breath. He won't because he can't. He truly believes he won "in a landslide."

And that's why I can't watch the Twin Cities' trial of Derek Chauvin, who is charged for the death of George Floyd, because it's hard not to feel that the divisions so painful in this country are growing ever wider and will continue to, no matter what the outcome.

Donald Trump could do something. Yet this morning, ex-President Trump could help us all take a giant step toward healing this nation. He could.

He won't, and his base, including millions of prayerful evangelicals, will continue to follow his deceit.

I just can't watch.

Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations

What's not to love about Italy? Wherever you go, there's a story in art and culture and some kind of pasta dressed up in fine sauces. Once the world gets vaccinated, the crowds will be back. Even Disneyland can't compete with Rome on a bad day.

There's St. Peter's, of course--go early and avoid the lines. There's the Colisseum and the Pantheon, and Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where mass has been celebrated every morning since (wait for this now) the fourth century--you heard me right--the fourth century, which makes 1492 sound like last week.

Some fabulously wealthy Roman, or so the story goes, caught a vision of the Virgin who somehow made it clear that he should build a new cathedral on the spot where she'd make it snow the next day. It was August--who could have guessed? The next day, mid-summer, there was snow. Then a cathedral.

But even if you've not missed a celebration of mass in half a lifetime, chances are slim and none you could gain an audience with the Pope back then or anytime through the years, even today.

But on January 27, 1887, a young woman named Katharine Drexel met with Pope Leo XIII, but then Katharine Drexel, who would, later in life, officially become a saint, wasn't just your average Josephine. Her father, an investment banker from Philadelphia, was rich--mega, no other way of saying it. When he died, she and her sisters, a fine Catholic family in Philadelphia, came heir to his millions. 

But Katharine wasn't some dowdy rich girl. Her parents had taught her to respond to the poor--to give, well, endlessly. She told the pope she thought he should, without delay, send missionaries to Native people throughout the American west because they were suffering and had already suffered brutal injustices.

The story goes that Pope Leo smiled. "Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?" he famously said, and thus began a saga that even touched Siouxland, many, many thousands of miles away.

Once the Missouri River determined to slice through South Dakota, it created a glorious scar, leaving huge grassy shoulders on both sides of a valley so breathtaking that if you're driving you have to remind yourself to keep your eyes on the road. If you follow Old Muddy northwest out of Yankton, you hug the only segment of the river that looks at all like the unruly waterway it once was.

The tiny town of Greenwood--yes, Lewis and Clark stopped there--may well be the most historic ghost town in North America. Up on a hill a monument celebrates the 1853 Treaty, which wasn't exactly a victory for the Yankton who lived there. In 1890, a ghost dance was held there along the river, just one of many throughout the west and so frightened white folks that the massacre at Wounded Knee resulted.

But keep going, past the churches and the tribe's herd of buffalos on your left. You can stop at the cemetery and see old Ree's monument some other time, but get yourself to Marty, a burg named after South Dakota's first real Bishop.

You'll spot this towering landmark from miles away, but only when you drive into town will you measure just how mammoth it is up close, the Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations, an immense, gorgeous limestone house of worship worthy of that long name.

Whatever you do, get yourself inside. Ask around. Get yourself a tour from one of the Sisters, who live next door. The dog won't bite.

What's behind the altar is a wall of portraits--popes and bishops, disciples and apostles, saints of all ages. Takakwitha is here, "Lily of the Mohawks, the only Native saint.

The stained glass is gorgeous, all of it done by an a St. Louis artist named Emil Frei, who learned his art from his father, a Bavarian glassmaker. The stations of the cross feature Natives in every Holy Week role, including the Savior.

Physically and spiritually, the Church of St. Paul, Apostle of the Nations, was the dream of the Eisenman brothers, one of whom, a priest, Father Sylvester, came west when three Yankton men, Thunder Horse, Zephyr, and Yellow Bird went recruiting.

The other was a builder, Father Sylvester's actual blood brother, Leonard John Eisenman. Together, ora et labora, the two Eisenman brothers directed twenty or so local workman through the years it took to build the place.

But not to be forgotten was the work and the support, in every way, of a woman of means who once held council with the Pope. Katharine Drexel, Saint Katharine, sent her own order, The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to the new cathedral at Marty, South Dakota.

It's a huge place and a huge story, even out here near Greenwood, where Lewis and Clark made camp out of a river that still looks today as if the Corps of Discover could once again come ashore. If you don't know it's there, St. Paul's will appear as if out of nowhere. But there it is, immense.

Not until you leave, not until you keep going north or turn around and head back towards Yankton will you draw breath again. It's that kind of vision. It's just plain amazing.

Reading Mother Teresa--Ritual

May these words of my mouth 

and this meditation of my heart 

be pleasing in your sight, Lord, 

my Rock and my Redeemer. Psalm 19:14

The other day I can’t tell you how bad I felt. – There was a moment when I nearly refused to accept. – Deliberately I took the Rosary and very slowly without even meditating or thinking – I said it slowly and calmly. The moment passed. . . . (238, Letter to Bishop Picachy)

I was 32 years old when someone at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference called to tell me that my application for a scholarship had been accepted and they were offering me a position as a waiter. I had no idea what that meant, but I understood proudly that the offer was a good, good thing.

It’s now more another 32 years later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I felt that my being chosen for a scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, signaled fame and fortune.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the conference, I met another conferee, a woman my age, married with two children, an aspiring poet. Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to a small jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she told me.

The atmosphere during that mountaintop retreat had been electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life – dawn ‘till dawn – was always on stage. She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen in every way. Now, regrettably, she had to go back to real life.

I’ll admit it – I wasn’t accustomed to either the pace or the character of life at Bread Loaf.

On a Sunday morning, I had walked away from people to a weathered Adirondack chair in a broad meadow, where I sat for an hour, feeling blessed sustenance simply from thinking deeply about my little son’s soft arm, trying to imagine what his hand would feel like in mine, all the while reciting the familiar words of the 23rd psalm.

That moment is likely the closest I ever came to meditation, and I’ll never forget it.

When the Rosary was recited over the radio when I was a boy, my parents raised an eyebrow, rolled their eyes, and turned it off – “vain repetition,” we were always told, quoting the gospel’s admonition against such tomfoolery. I never thought of the Rosary as anything else.

But when I think of Mother Teresa’s besieged soul, when I see her sitting in silence, her fingers on each separate bead while repeating those prayers over and over again, I don’t think of all those repetitions as being in any way, shape, or form, vain.

When our ritual is empty, it isn’t ritual at all. But when it’s earnest as it was at least one day in the life of Mother Teresa, when it’s undertaken in passionate desire for peace and joy, then it is, in a way even a Calvinist might acknowledge, sacramental.

That weathered Adirondack chair sits in a defined place in my soul’s memory, I swear. As does Mother Teresa, stooping, praying, meditating, beads in hand, in an impassioned ritual I may likely never share, in nearly faithless hope of a spiritual blessing, even if only for a day, peace to quell the heavy burden of her doubt.

A prairie gallery

 

I'm guessing he knew it was a big deal, but what he didn't know was how big. I can't imagine that this man, out on what he considered his land, behind his own team of oxen--I'm guessing he understood that he was transforming the world, opening up the ground, turning it productive, making a place for himself, his family, and his dreams. He couldn't be blind to changing the world.

But he's not at the heart of things. Up close, he's a fortress of a guy, broad-chested, tall and lean, huge arms. What he's doing dominates the painting, but even his plowing seems part of the setting. Dunn loves the dog. In some ways, he's the focal point, carefree, romping through the uncut prairie grass, content simply to be out in a big world of the plains. The buffalo skull is deliberately hidden, as if Dunn didn't want it to get too much attention. 

But that skull is the key to Harvey Dunn's interest, I think, because that buffalo skull testifies to what once was, to what is being transformed, both what's left behind and what's lost. That's the bigger story, the one the strapping farmer/rancher only partially understands. He knows his story, and it's big. What he doesn't see--maybe that's why Dunn partially covers the skull--is the real story--immense change, a world forever altered by a single-bottom plow and the hard-working white man behind it.

What Harvey Dunn, as well known as any American illustrator, wanted to do with his life and work after his experience in war was paint big, paint huge, paint something more appropriately scaled to the whole human enterprise. He didn't want to stylize a short story, pretty-up the cover of a magazine, or use his brushes to sell anything, not even automobiles. He kept illustrating, but the war taught him something abiding about the human character and broad drama of life itself, and when he couldn't finish all those sketches he made during the war, he turned to a world he may not even have thought of before he left for Europe. He turned for inspiration to his own epic childhood on the prairie.

He wasn't alone. No less a figure than Teddy Roosevelt found something that left him in awe in big skies and endless horizons. When Willa Cather left Red Cloud, Nebraska, she never became homesick enough to take up residence back there again, but neither could ever leave totally. When a friend and fellow writer suggested that she begin telling the stories of her childhood out in a world not unlike the one being plowed in Dunn's painting, Cather began a writing life that centered right there.

After the war, Harvey Dunn stumbled back home and spent years there, even though he only visited occasionally. His heroes, understandably, are often women. 

Here she sits, her baby on a blanket surrounded by a gallery of chickens, the sod house almost welcoming, sunflowers thoughtfully watching her, not the sun behind them. The dog stands guard. If you follow the stream of chickens all the way back, Dunn celebrates the family's successes by including a ramshackle barn to illustrate clearly how things have improved. The sky is a sea of cotton. Even the baby seems entranced by the huge sky she's only beginning to see.

This prairie Madonna sits beside her husband as a oxen rest in the background, having made it up a long hill above the river beneath. His eyes are on the horizon. He's still planning out the route to where he needs to go. She tends to a baby so young it almost certainly had to have been born aboard the schooner.

Even here, where the would-be settlers dominate the canvas, it's the land itself, the setting of the story that is the story, this wide forever-land.

Here, Dunn puts a neighbor far off in the distance, a half mile away from her place, their place, which is likely behind us--it's where she's going. But for purposes of this portrait, the homestead isn't of great interest. What is a tall and strong and beautiful woman who will never, ever be a cowboy, even when she spends her afternoon like a cowpoke. Her wrestling cattle isn't the story. What Dunn can't stop painting is her world, her new huge world. She's barely a settler.

Even here in the fearful darkness a few seconds before a storm that may well blow them all away, she may well be in the center of the canvas, but the world where she lives is the story's real protagonist.

I've always felt, well, proud of the fact that Willa Cather's best work are two novels all about the prairie world she grew up within, My Antonia and O, Pioneers! Just as I am proud of the plain and simple fact that when Harvey Dunn returned from war he looked back to the plains as a place he could do what his artistic soul had begun to tell him to do, to paint the big picture.

Harvey Dunn and the war

Illustration from "The Lord Taketh and the Lord Giveth,"
a story by Cyrus Townsend Brady in the Ladies Home Journal.

 

South Dakota's Harvey Dunn was no starving artist, no dreamy Vincent. He was, in every way, a realist. His characters, after all, were recognizably human, and he'd never considered art to be something for which he shouldn't earn a healthy living. He and his family lived sumptuously in a big, beautiful house, he courted work from America's leading magazines, and painted and drew with the same tenacity his father had mounted to plow the native prairie his son had left behind when he went off to Chicago. Harvey Dunn did well.

Today, it's increasingly hard to imagine what kind of hold magazines once had on American consciousness. Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post were news networks, mini-libraries, that bi-weekly offered subscribers portraits of the world beyond their front porch. 

Those big magazines did so, not because they alone communicated news and culture, but because each worked hard at producing visually attractive content. A story by Ernest Hemingway required a new portrait of the writer, in addition to a story illustration, or two or three, by someone capable of creating an image as remarkable as the stories they chose for publication. 

Harvey Dunn's work ethic was as estimable as his track record turned out to be. He pleased editors because he pleased their subscribers, and he did his work on time. What's more, he did a lot of work. He and his family lived comfortably, to say the least, and he drove show-stopping automobiles in an era pre-dating the garage.

When the nation went to war in 1917, Harvey Dunn was called upon, even though his 34 years put him beyond the reach of the draft board. He and seven other artists were given the assignment of documenting the war effort, for posterity--and, yes, public relations too, a pair of sometimes conflicting ends.

Dunn loved the work and didn't shy away from the front. He lugged his equipment into dark and terrible corners, and, surprisingly, turned out fewer finished pieces than did his contemporaries, most of whom didn't court the dangers as frequently as he had. 

In 1918, the nation was singing "How you going to keep them down on the farm, now that he's Parieey" once the carnage ended. War changes things, and, more significantly, war changed the doughboys. Harvey Dunn, who produced less but did more, suffered a verifiable change of heart after experiencing what he did.

His limited production wasn't short on volume. Along the way, he created endless sketches because he determined that, once back home, he would continue to work for the government and turn those sketched memories into pieces that would come to define the war he experienced, the war America had fought through. He made offers, but the government wasn't buying, they weren't interested in more. The war was over.

That failure, his biographers claim, was the most crushing defeat of his life, not because he needed work--he never needed work--but because the war had shaped him into a someone who determined that his art was going to be more than illustration. It needed not simply to highlight good things, but be good things. The war made him want to do more on canvas, to help people see big things that stood just beyond the view from the front porch.

War, World War I, had taught him something about himself and his work. And when the government turned its back on his particular dreams, he determined to look elsewhere for inspiration to speak truth. 

Strangely enough--and thankfully--he looked homeward, home to the prairie.

Love Story (end)

I didn't come to college to avoid the draft, although, in the fall of 1966, I was very much aware of the alternative and wanted no part of southeast Asian jungles. During high school, my life was eaten up by athletics, in every season, in gyms and on successive fields. I don't regret that those years were all about sports. I was, in time and place, quite normal that way, moderately excessive.

My dad was never much of an athlete, but Mom was. The only "sport" for women in Oostburg High School, mid-Depression, was cheerleading--and she was one of them. Once I had a glove, she used to take me out in our backyard to play catch. I had no illusions about that--this wasn't just child's play; my mother meant to make me an athlete. She wasn't just tossing a ball, she was intent on making me good at it. Strange, but what I remember best about those moments was the deliberate speed of her pitching at me. I think she wanted to make me a man in the very traditional way of small-town America--she wanted to make me an athlete.

I don't remember playing catch with my dad, not that he was never in the backyard, not that he didn't want me playing ball. He simply didn't make himself available. I knew--and it was fine with me--that he was doing things that were worth his time and not spending time with me. He was mayor, for pity sake, and on the school board, and in the church consistory, while trying to make a living in a factory a half-hour away, an office where he wasn't always particularly comfortable.

Once I started playing little league baseball--we called it "pee-wees"--people would walk up to me after ball games and tell me how much I looked like my old man out there. They were wrong. No one remembered my dad holding down third base or hitting the ball all the way out to the bandstand; they remembered my uncle Allie, Mom's brother, doing such things. Even though I was slow out of the box, didn't grow into my adult proportions until I was 16, I was bigger than my dad, significantly, and therefore, to sports fans around town, I even looked as if I was Allie's boy. Dad didn't like that. Can't blame him.

It's fair to say, therefore, that I went to college to play ball. I didn't think of myself as a fanatic or a star, but I did believe I had skills, and I looked forward to playing basketball and baseball at the college where my sisters had attended, a college safe within the nest of our familial brand of denominational orthodoxy, one of just a couple campuses where all of "us" went. I didn't look forward to homework, and I spent some time worrying about not making the grade, about the possibility of flunking out, not because getting sent home would have meant a date with the draft board, but because I knew my failure would dishonor my parents.

I had a wonderful childhood in many ways, but one of the factors that that played a role in creating, in me, a sufficiently good self-image was that I was proud of who and what my parents were. We lived a block north of the church, but it wasn't proximity that brought a long line of church visitors to our home, it was my parents who wanted visitors to stay at our place, to eat at our table, to chat over coffee in the living room. Both of my parents loved talk, loved ideas, loved to understand the rudiments of the latest raging doctrinal controversy. They were very conservative, but then everyone was, but not intolerant.

The caricature Dutch Reformed father--senseless, brutish, a tool of his tools brandishing outsized conservative views, work-driven--that was not Dad. I got the idea for my novel Romey's Place from a cousin, who told me that her marriage counselor told her the problems in their marriage was created in part by the fact that her dad was just too good, that she needed to understand the man she'd married didn't have her father's qualities, nor would he ever. Her dad was my father's little brother. Romey's Place is about growing up with parents who are, in essence, too good, how being good can be a hindrance to grace.

I was a good, solid B student in high school; I wasn't Dean's List material. I got along well enough, maybe scored some good grades occasionally, but my own strengths as a kid were on display elsewhere--in the gym and among friends. There's no doubt that I had a comfortable life in the circle of the most admired kids. I was--as we used to say back then--popular. Kids liked me and wanted to like me. Aside from some fears of not performing academically, when I walked on campus for the first time, I wasn't fearful or shy, wasn't nervous, wasn't dying to be accepted, wasn't even all that worried, Vietnam or not. I was ready for college life. Bring it on.

There were some Harvey Dunn-types around back then, some guys so fresh from the farm they couldn't help carrying the aroma, some guys who had done nothing but the milking for most of their lives before being sent off to a "good" school, one that leaned heavily on the catechism and virtually assured eventual marriage vows in wooden shoes.

Miss Mary Hooper was not a professor. She had what we might call an "assistantship" today, if the college had a graduate school. It didn't. Miss Hooper was thoughtful graduate of the college just a year before, an excellent student and an English major. That made her qualified for a couple of classes of freshmen. I'm sure she came cheap. The college was, in 1966, just beginning its second decade, enrollments were rising. There was need. Miss Mary Hooper was recruited. She barely had time to take off her mortarboard.

I was enrolled in her first class. She was likeable because she was, for the college, a liberal, in that she allowed us to tell her the truth. She created a climate that was a bit slipshod for higher education, that felt more than a little like a semi-rambunctious high school classroom. We didn't bow and curtsey when she walked in, like we might have for some of the esteemed professorial types who stood behind the lecterns in other classes. When she stood behind the podium, she was the only woman I saw up there that first year.

She was not a raving beauty, but she was interesting to us because she was just unorthodox enough to make us pay attention. And then there was Hemingway and "A Sculptor's Funeral," and talk about literature's value and how to read it. I don't know how to say it, but I somehow found all of that really.

And writing. 

I can't find the paper right now, although I can't imagine having thrown it away. I kept it for 55 years because it's as important an assignment as I ever accomplished, not because I did such original work but because she loved it. She was a first-year teacher, reading student papers for the very first time--what did she know? She wasn't experienced, hadn't spent any time to speak of in the classroom, but when she handed back the little essay she had all of us do with, on mine, an A at the bottom and a single line, all in caps: "You can write, guy. You've got to write a novel someday," she changed my life, right then and there. 

One line of praise, one suggestion no one else had ever dreamed. One red sentence at the bottom of the page. That's how it is I'm watching the letters flash up on the screen right now and how it is you're reading them.

"You've got to write a novel someday."

So I did. And have.

And the first one, titled Home Free, bears this dedication:

Seriously, it's just another love story.

A Love Story (ii)

I've got my prejudices here, which I'll divulge eventually, but I like to imagine Prof. Ada Berta Caldwell, just a year or so into what would be a long, long tenure at the new land grant college, suddenly coming upon the upstart talent of a real Dakota sodbuster named Harvey Dunn, as unlikely an artist as any unlettered farm kid the school enrolled. Like his father, in all likelihood he was something of a clod, except with a brush and palette. 

Whereas she--well, look at her. She knew very well at what angle to wear a hat like that, how to tease that scarf into hanging loosely about her neck. She'd been reared, after all, in Lincoln, Nebraska, home of the university, and she'd lived downtown Chicago, where she'd studied art at the Institute and seen far more than her share of the world's great art. She'd taken this agricultural school job with dreams of a bright future for the institution, in a prairie world just beginning to fill with all kinds of newcomers.

Ada B. Caldwell is eminently worldly, and her student is essentially a sweet bumpkin of a guy, and a big one at that, big-boned, big-shouldered. He's nice--everybody likes him, she could see that; but he'd never been any farther east than the Big Sioux River. Brookings was a metropolis to him. Eager, sure--but in many ways not a purposefully high-achiever.

But, my word, this big guy could draw, could see, could mix color, could dream on a canvas. What an incalculable joy he must have been for Prof. Caldwell, a brand new teacher in a brand new job. What a blessing to find right there among all those farm boys a kid who didn't need to be told what was and what wasn't beautiful, a boy capable of turning out beauty all by himself from what seemed a bottomless resource of God-given talent.

A boy whose talent would, a couple decades later, put this kind of portrait on canvas, should not be sentenced to this kind of life. He had talent to show the world.

I'd love to know how it was she dared suggest he tell his parents that he wasn't coming home to farm, how she broke the news to him that she had other plans for his raw-boned talent, that he should think instead of going east to Chicago, to the same Art Institute where she'd spent four lovely years. Would she have used the word lovely? How did she speak to him anyway? As his teacher--she wasn't much older than he was. As an artist?--what if he determined her language and carriage too intimidating? How did she even dare steer his life the way she found herself powerless not to?

Did it ever occur to her that in simply raising so unimaginable a future, she would be sending him after pipe dreams that would make him forever incapable of working the land or feeding cattle the way his father did and, in all likelihood, figured his son destined to do? Did she worry about destroying his parents' sense of their son's future? 

I'm thinking not. I'm thinking one of the elements of this significant moment in life of Harvey Dunn, illustrator and artist, is Prof. Caldwell's relative youth. Ada B. Caldwell went on to a long and spirited tenure at South Dakota State University. She wasn't simply an artiste. Just a few years later, she ran the women's dorm and, when that went well, became the Dean of Women. She wasn't monkish at all. I'm guessing she could well have donned a beret, she was clearly no flighty aesthete. 

But Ada B. Caldwell hadn't had an abundance of students when Harvey Dunn from Kingsbury County came lumbering into her classroom. And while it was clear he drew figures like no one else in that class, she probably hadn't seen that kind of talent before. Ada B. Caldwell, Chicago Institute of Art alum, really hadn't had many students when Harvey Dunn came along. 

She, well, lost it. You have to go on, she said, probably impulsively, like a rookie might. You have to keep working, Mr. Dunn, she probably said. You can't just turn your back on so much God-given talent. 

And more.

"I really don't care what your father will say, Mr. Dunn," she probably said. "What you have to offer is something you just have to do."

What did she know anyway, young as she was?

(more tomorrow)

A Love Story

If you look closely, you can tell it's not the Great Plains. That big tree is maybe a bit too perfect; prairie trees take a mauling by incessant big winds. They almost always look akimbo. This one seems a real Joyce Kilmer, too polite for the plains. The roof tops make clear the artist was out near a farm, but the outline of that house--see it, beneath the branches of the tree?--doesn't look much like a Dakota homestead at the turn of the 20th century. Seriously, Corinthian columns out front? You could find hilly terrain like this all along the Missouri River, but eastern South Dakota, the place where Ada B. Caldwell spent most of her life, doesn't offer much akin to the scene she caught in this sweet, but ordinary oil.

No matter. Think of it as a love story anyway, because it was, maybe not in a conventional sense of the phrase--I mean, I don't think there was any hanky-panky between teacher and student. He was rough hewn, to say the least, fresh off the farm, at the college only because the place was land-grant and therefore full of offerings for boys/men like himself who were looking to learn something about the farms they'd come from. In fact, it was called, in 1901, the South Dakota Agricultural College.

Only he wasn't really one of them. This particular student was at Brookings because of his mother, who loved him and probably wasn't all that much different from the woman that graces his most widely loved painting, The Prairie is My Garden.



The mom here is not going to grace the cover of some Hollywood tabloid any time soon, but she's perfectly beautiful in a strong and determined prairie way. Her kids love her, and she loves them, takes them along when she determines to grace her place up a bit with some cone flowers. The Prairie is My Garden, by Harvey Dunn, painting is quintessential Great Plains stuff; and she, or so the docents at the Art Museum claim, is "the Mona Lisa of South Dakota."

That determination on her face--she's not smiling--is a facet of a work ethic that's not only formidable but beyond belief. The frame buildings behind her suggest that the hardscrabble days of homesteading is now history. Her place has been "improved" to homestead standards; there's some livestock and a house that's already seen an addition or two. But things are not Edenic--they never are--because creating a life around the weather on the all-too viscous plains is never really behind you. Mom needs to be wary.

Is she Dunn's mother? Yes, in spirit certainly. It was his mother who was strong enough to get his I-shall-not-be-moved father to allow son Harvey to go the agriculture school. It was his mother who had sat with him as a boy, the two of them sketching together by lamp light. It was his mother who determined her boy--no longer a boy, but a man--needed to get away from the demands of farm work and see, even if only for a year, that other people lived unimaginably other lives. It was not his father, it was his mother who believed in flowers, who saw the prairie as a garden.

Then again, this Mona Lisa is also a woman named Ada B. Caldwell, the woman who did that oil at the top of the page. Prof. Caldwell was a teacher at the agricultural college that became South Dakota State University, the only teacher who paid much attention to the big strapping farm kid from a town called Manchester, a town a tornado finally blew away a couple decades ago. She saw what he could do on a canvas for what it was--talent. Sheer, raw talent.

She's the one who sent him off to the school she attended herself, the Chicago Art Institute. She 'd taken a job at Yankton College, staying only a year, then moved on to Brookings, where she stayed in the classroom for the rest of her life, where in just her second year of teaching, she taught drawing to a hulking farm boy named Harvey Dunn. 

Ada B. Caldwell + Harvey Dunn?--it is a love story. She made it clear to him that what he was feeling in his heart wasn't illusion or fantasy. She helped him understand that he'd likely never be happy just going back to the homestead. She allowed him to love what he already did, to follow what he loved in directions he'd never imagined.

She did nothing more or less than notice what was deeply embedded there in this big, broad-shouldered farm boy who could do wonders with a brush. She saw it for what it was, talent; and she let it grow, nurtured it, and sent it on its way to gardens just as wondrous as his Mona Lisa's.

It is a love story. It's a school room love story.

Reading Mother Teresa--Bewonderment

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11

The basic paradigm by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is the outline of a drama that rises from the handbook of doctrine with which I was raised. That outline goes like this: “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin – our knowledge of it, as it exists within us. Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, with our sense of God as manifest in his world: what we see and experience. Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and the earth around us, we come to know that there is a God. With that knowledge, we feel our own limitations – that we aren’t God. And there begins our knowledge of human limits, our knowledge, finally, of sin.

That conviction draws us closer to God because we need a Savior. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second act.

Once we know that he loves us, in spite of our sin, our hearts fill, our souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate our salvation. That celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into doing what we can to be his agents of love in the world he loves so greatly.

Sin, salvation, service – three acts of a drama that is composes all of our lives.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale in three different acts, was created, I suppose, by her experiences in the ghettos of Calcutta. We begin with repulsion, she says, what we see, she says – brokenness, sadness – offends, prompts us to look away.

But we really can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion – away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. End Act II.

The final act is what she called “bewonderment,” which is sheer wonder plus a-grade admiration. Our compassion leads us to bewonderment.

“Bewonderment” is likely one of those words no one uses but everyone understands. Still, like reverence, it’s hard to come by in a world where our sorest needs are never more than a price tag away.

I’ll admit that bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story that is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life – or always has been – for me, not “bewonderment.”

I’m more than a little envious of David’s praise in Psalm 57. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him. I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole in my life and yours. I’m forever asking for favors, some big, some not, but am only rarely into adoration, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe.

But bewonderment, awe, is something I’m learning, even this morning, and for that I’m thankful – for the book of songs, for David, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57.

It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God – to be so close to a being so great and grand and seemingly out of reach. But bewonderment is something I think we can learn, all of us, even an old man like me, if he has ears.

Me and You and the Mormons*

 

The news from Salt Lake City is not particularly comforting if you’re Mormon. One of the mighty has fallen, a saint from the inmost circle of the Latter-Day Saints. For the first time in thirty years, a man from the First Quorum of the Seventy was told to pack his bags. He was excommunicated.

When I was a boy, the word excommunication was used with fear and trembling. Only once did I sit through a reading of that form from the back of the Psalter; but I remember it well because the whole affair was difficult and therefore dramatic.

Once upon a time, many churches would assess their determination to remain on the paths of righteousness on the basis of their commitment to what we called “church discipline,” a function of the body of Christ recognized as one of the “keys of the kingdom” (Q and A 83 of the Heidelberg Catechism). People believed that if you didn’t exercise church discipline, you weren’t really the bride of Christ. And way out there at the far end of “church discipline” sat excommunication, a ritual no one joked about. It was a different time, a different age.

Except in Salt Lake City, where a man named James J. Hamula was excommunicated, even though he’d been a member the church’s most saintly circle since 2008 and had served as a missionary—full-time, and an elder, a stake leader.

Following accepted tradition, no reason was given, although church authorities did say it was not occasioned by apostasy or disillusionment. That leaves little but scandal, what size and shape will eventually out, I’m sure, as those things do. Simply, the council of discipline reported the man was no longer an officer and no longer a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Ladder-Day Saints. Nope. Out.

Seems brutal, medieval. To most of us today, the perfect is often the enemy of the good. And it is.

Four times in my life I’ve been proselytized, a Book of the Mormon placed concernedly in my hands. Thrice in museum visits: once, years ago, in Salt Lake City, at the Tabernacle, where my children—just kids then—went slack-jawed when someone tried to save their souls; a second time at Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith discovered the very golden plates that held the Book; a third time just recently at a fine museum commemorating the Mormon Trail and the Winters Quarters, where hundreds of houses were built almost overnight for thousands of Mormons who would spend the winter of 1846 across the Missouri from a town named Omaha.

(By the way, it's okay to sing "Come, Come Ye Saints" at my funeral, even though it's deeply Mormon. It was penned on the Great Trek, not that far from here; and to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's rendition makes me weep. Listen yourself sometime.)

The Mormons do museums with the same righteous diligence with which the keep the church pure—okay, maybe a bit over-the-top by my estimation, but there’s no accounting for taste. Each time, each place, I was handed a Book of the Mormon and beckoned to read it to discover its eternal truth. Each time, I told those decent docents that I already had one, thank you.

And I do, and it’s inscribed, a treasure really, a gift—read on.

My only Book of the Mormon was a gift from two of my high school students—I liked them, they liked me. There were a lot of LDS kids at Greenway High School, Phoenix, Arizona. One of them, Carrie, had conversion on her mind back in 1976, as most Mormons do (she was no relation that I know of to Joseph Smith, although the man had forty wives).

Sadly enough, her mission failed, even though I remember her darling personality, her thoughtful smarts, and her intense work ethic. A whole class of Carrie Smiths, and I could have been teaching in northwest Iowa.

Via the wonders of social media, I stay in contact with Carrie Smith, who’s a grandmother herself these days and, amazingly, evangelical Christian. That's right, no longer Mormon. I didn’t ask why. She seems happy.

Yesterday, to her Facebook friends (which includes me), she sent out a note with a url linking to a Salt Lake City TV station, who had run a story titled thusly: “Losing their religion: Millennials, including Utahans, leaving church.” (The story’s in the title. No need for me to quote chapter and verse).

But that that news came from her, from an actual “jack” Mormon, as the fallen are often called, was somehow notable in my book, in my soul. I bear no grudge, no enmity for her confidence that, way back then, I wasn't among the elect. That she was the one sent out the url, just made me smile.

Why? I suppose it’s just another reminder of two basic truths basic. Good Lord, we all have sinned and stand in need of grace, every last one of us. And somewhere along the line, in one way or another, all of us have been poor James Hamula.

______________

*First appeared here August 9, 2017

Reviewed--Nomadland

There are plenty of reasons to see Nomadland, if you haven't already. Two of them call out like sirens from the old epics, singing to the entire country. Tell you what, make that three because Nomadland now threatens to take over the Emmys. It's got lots and lots of nominations, including, of course, Best Picture. 

It's been two weeks or so since we went, just a couple days after it opened at just down the road. No, that night it didn't attract a crowd, and it likely won't. I don't know what its trailer looks like, but I'm sure it can't compete with most any block-buster because, to be truthful, Nomadland is a story set within the heart and soul of its central character, a woman who is not swept away by grief or circumstance but simply chooses to live unfettered, to wander at will through the American West. 

That character is named Fern, but Fern is played by Francis McDormand, who, even though she is not just another pretty face, is someone most people will recognize because of the mysterious force of character she brings to anything she does on the screen, including, most memorably, her starring role in Fargo. Francis McDormand is anything but Hollywood. She's unapologetically normal, and you can't help feeling all the way through Nomadland that she is, in essence, playing herself. If you didn't know better, you'd swear the movie is a documentary, but it isn't--it's scripted all the way through.

Francis McDormand is one reason we bought tickets just a day or two after it opened. You can't help but love her. Another reason is the role given graciously to American West, a region that includes us, but just barely. Mostly, all I have to do is cross the Big Sioux River and I'm in "the American West," twenty miles tops. The ads you might have seen featured the Badlands, a place where I've spent some time in the last couple years, an unearthly spot that makes most first-time visitors ask the same question: "What happened here?" 

McDormand is the movie's acting genius--she is Nomadland. The story is overwhelmingly character-based. Not a whole lot happens--no car chase, no drug busts, no wildly hypocrite preacher. Once Fern meets Dave, a quiet, sweet man played by David Strathairn, the plot suggests a blooming love story, but it doesn't go there finally because Nomadland wants its audience to wander just as peacefully as Fern and her friends, all of whom live in trailers that drift through the staggeringly beautiful American West. 

Not for a moment do you sit on the edge of your chair. What draws your attention--and holds it--is interplay between Francis McDormand, a woman essentially playing a role she finds in her own soul, and a yawning landscape that still delivers enough drama on its own to make you wonder why there aren't film crews galore running around through the open land just beyond the Big Sioux. 

Nomadland is unlike any other movie I've ever seen. It's heartwarming, but it won't make you cry. It's lovely, but you won't go buy the soundtrack. It's wise, but not a bit preachy. It's beautiful because, doggone it, Fern is, even though it's impossible to imagine Francis McDormand on the red carpet in some deeply slit hundred-thousand dollar dress.

It's not a love story, not a travelogue, not an expose. It's a intense and intentional portrait of people you don't really see everyday, even though if you live in a place like I do, you know them anyway. They're a displaced lot really, the central forces of their lives have simply disappeared, along with their jobs, and, in Fern's case, their spouses. 

But they're not frantic. They don't go all to pieces. They make do by becoming nomads and friends, and you can't help but think sometimes that they're the lucky ones. It would take me some time, I think, to come up with another movie that is only a portrait and nothing more. I'm reminded, in a way, of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a theological novel that features a good, good man readying himself for death. Gilead is the Rev. John Ames; it's his portrait. Without him, there's no novel.

Fern--and Francis McDormand--is to Nomadland what John Ames is to Gilead. They're both just wonderful. 

Nomadland is unique, in part, at least, because it's anything but "Tinseltown."

Morning Thanks--Deb Haaland

I not sure just how often the big flea market is open down on the Navajo Reservation, just outside of Gallup, New Mexico, but I think it may be open for business every Saturday--and business it does. It's big, football-fields big. If you simply want to walk through--if you're not looking for Zuni bread or some kind of silver or turquoise jewelry or CDs or videos or tires or tools or just about anything--it'll still take you some time just to cruise the loop. Besides, somewhere along the line you'll not be able to pass up the honey and fry bread.

I've spent an hour or two there, just outside of town, several times. No curios down here or up the library could call the Gallup Flea Market home--I don't know that I came away with any great buys. Just being there some Saturday would be high on my list of things to do when back in town. I'd go again in a heartbeat. 

But then, I like flea markets. What seems a hundred years ago, I used to sell things at a huge one on a parking lot of a dog racing park off 40th street in Phoenix. 

But Gallup's is unique because the sellers and buyers are just about all Native people, mostly Navajo. If you're a white guy at the Gallup Flea Market, you're one of few, a minority for sure, a PONC, a Person of No Color.  I've not spent my life around crowds of Native people, so the feeling of being alone is suddenly and uncomfortably very real and even disconcerting--there's no one, or very few, who look like you. 

Deb Haaland, a tribal leader among the Laguna Pueblo people before gaining a post in the New Mexico legislature, a woman who got an education and completed a law degree as a single mom, became the Secretary of the Interior this week, when the Senate confirmed her nomination, 50-41 (with four Republican votes, itself a win). Will she succeed? Don't know? Will she do well? Time will tell. 

If the world of American politics were the Gallup Flea Market (cool idea!), imagine yourself (if you're not) a member of any of the 574 recognized Native tribes in this country. When you'd look through the portraits of Presidential cabinet members throughout history, you'd find none--zero--who looked at all like you, not this year or last, not for more than two hundreds years. Deb Haaland is the first Presidential Cabinet member from this country's indigenous people. She's fond of saying she's the only one who can say she's 35th generation American.

Will her leadership at the Department of the Interior be different from Trump's people? It's hard to imagine it won't. She'll likely be no shill to "drill, drill, drill" (remember Sarah Palin?). I don't think so. 

Will she be as radical as the Republicans paint her out to be? I don't know. This we do know. She's no Trumpian. She won't, like Ryan Zinke, Trump's choice, ride a horse named Tonto to work on her first day, and she likely won't begin her term in office by reviewing national monuments with an eye for cutting them back. Probably not.

It's a good bet she'll score more than the four percent rating given to Zinke from the League of Conservation Voters.

No matter how you look at it, you can't help but agree that it'll be just great for all those folks out at the Gallup Flea Market. For the first time in their own long American story, they'll be able to look at the Cabinet of the President of the United States and see someone who looks like they do. 

That's no small thing and good reason for morning thanks.

Laguna Pueblo

Morning Thanks--winter again

When I put out the garbage yesterday, I discovered more snow than I thought. Nothing like Cheyenne--maybe you've seen pictures: the streets are cavernous. Denver had a couple feet. Most of the world west of us had lots and lots more. 

Not much melted yesterday, so just outside my window there's still an inch or two, mostly untouched. Some bunny walked by out back--you can see his tracks. He probably visited the spread of provinder the birds leave beneath the feeders. That bright light, upper right, is likely a cattle truck coming up 60. Just beneath it, two long rectangles are visible now--they hadn't been for a couple months. After the storm, they're happily quilted with spongy and wet stuff, the snow that packs into great snowballs and rolls into snowmen (these days, are woke kids making snow women?).

Snow in March is often perfectly beautiful, but late winter spreads of the white stuff prove beyond a doubt that beauty is in the eye of the beholder because no one I know--including me--looks outside on a day this late in winter, sees the earth in ermine, and goes all breathless and artsy. Nope. We just want to be done with it all. 

Saturday I saw my first robin, about the biggest thrill I've had since the virus raised its infernal pestilence. Here he is.

And then this too, not a surprise really, but still a thrill.

And, no, those pellets beyond the nubbins aren't m&ms that somehow doffed their colorful candy coats. They're as much a testimony of that backyard bunny--or two or three or four--as those tracks in the new snow, just the refuse of a long winter. "Hops," our granddaughter calls them, so we do too.

It's the snow out that's the story. It's here again, fleetingly, I'm sure. By the weekend it'll be gone, maybe before. Schools were called yesterday, but what we got didn't blow or drift, just plopped down to rest and fade away. It'll melt slowly and sweetly right into those garden boxes, maybe a whole inch of moisture the world out here needs even more of.

It's a blessing, a great white blessing, even--maybe especially--this time of year. Hurts to say it a little, but it's good darn reason for thanksgiving. We're all just plain tired of winter. 

Still, I'm thankful. We all are. 

We just reserve the right to grumble a little.

Comfort to Spare (XVI--finis)

Oddly enough, the second to last meditation in Comfort to Spare sounds a bit like Martin Luther King. Van Baalen does not simply suggest biblical truth; he hammers it home in waves of affirmation determined to remember hope: We know. . .We know. . .We know. . .We know. . ." Four paragraphs in a row repeat the line before this one-sentence paragraph: "We know. We know. WE KNOW!" Relentless. Van Baalen simply will not abide fear or hesitation. Like God's love, he'd almost certainly say.

Does all of this consolation work? Did it help? It is possible this thoughtful gift from a shepherd to his suffering flock was a God-sent? Comfort to Spare has been out of print for years, I'm sure. Who can know? But what I've been thinking about is far more specific--whether the pastor's advice to grieving parents helped my grandparents, given what I know of them.  

Combined with the prayers he writes out in the meditations, then commands the grieving parents to read with him, I can't help but believe it was. From the cold shock of that first meditation ("If thou faint in the day of adversity, Thy strength is small') to the fierce determinations in later chapter, Van Baalen unloads God's love and his divine purpose into a reader's soul. Your mourning will turn to dancing, he tells them. We know that. Such are God's promises. WE KNOW. All this darkness notwithstanding, believers KNOW our Redeemer will not leave them outside the radiance of His love and grace. 

Among the Lakota, I'm told, traditional culture had its own way of dealing with grief. When a loved one died, demonstrations of grief, no matter how outlandish or outrageous, were tolerated. Grief had no limits or bounds. A grieving spouse was allowed to be inconsolable, to leave the band and wander through the trees or open prairie grasses, to cut herself, to chant and scream her grief. But when some set time period ended--maybe three or four days--the grief had to stop. The band needed its people to be well. Some few days of grace was perfectly fitting, but then, no more, none.

Van Baalen is not that abrupt, but his remedy--the unconditional love of God, is as absolute. Van Baalen does not enable. He won't allow excess. His faith insists precious children have already found themselves in bliss, enclosed in the arms of their Saviour's love. WE KNOW that, he says, time and time again. Now believe it.

That second-to-last meditation begins with Romans 8:28: "And we know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose." And right there, in the book, there's a note penciled in: "Text used in Gertrude's funeral sermon." 

I'd love to believe the handwriting isn't the same as what I found inside the front cover because I'd like to believe the note is Grandpa's penmanship. I don't think Grandma Dirkse would refer to her daughter as "Gertrude." My mother referred to her as "Gert," and for some reason, to me she's "Aunt Gertie." Her father, in his own deep grief, would have more specifically reached for her baptized name.

But there's more. Rev. Van Baalen finishes the book with a familiar proverb: "Only one life 't'will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last." And finally, "To me, to live is Christ."

I saw that line every day of my childhood, even when I wasn’t looking to read it or even glance its way. An old plaque in some baroque calligraphy featured that line and hung from the wall beside a library in a hallway upstairs.

What’s scribbled in beside those words on the final page of the book makes this thin, old volume of Van Baalen meds priceless. “Plaque on her wall selected by her.” Same handwriting as the line indicating the text of her funeral service. Same handwriting--Grandpa's handwriting.

I didn't want to like Comfort to Spare. I thought it would be syrupy. It is not. It doesn't countenance sentimentality. It pushes and argues and it creates prayers, one after another, for grief-stricken people who can't raise their head or hands to God. It's tough.

I want those two scribbled in notes to have been written by Grandpa Dirkse. I'd like to believe he found some of it aimed directly at dour believers like him, men and women given to fretting through bouts of anxiety down in the depth of their sins. I'd like to believe my grandma liked the book because she would have given silent approval to the almost bare-knuckled consolation.

I came heir to a ton of my parents’ things from their succession of slimdowns, sepia-toned pictures of great-grandparents no one else in the family have, I’m sure, old bills and receipts. I had my dad’s wedding ring, but gave it to my son when, at the wedding, his ring-bearer couldn’t find the one his wife had planned to put on his finger. A triangular box right in front of me holds the American flag given to us, his family, at his graveside.

I don't have the plaque Grandpa says Gertrude chose for her wall. I doubt my mother would have tossed it. Maybe one of my sisters has it. When I read what Grandpa scribbled on Comfort to Spare's last page, beside that old proverb, I couldn't help thinking the plaque upstairs in the house where I grew up may have been the very one Aunt Gertie chose for her very own.

I wish I had known all of that when I was a kid. It took me three-quarters of a century to identify what was all being said in those fancy raised lines on thick piece of plaster paris.

Maybe it’s gone, broken and tossed. My sisters tell me they don't have it. It broke maybe, but even if it didn't, it wouldn’t be worth a dime.

Still, today I can’t help wishing I had it. And that's silly of me really because I do. I've come heir to the faith that animated all of them--parents and grandparents. When I see plaques like the one once ours, I can't help but think I still own it, and that it still owns me.

Somewhere close, I can't help but believe, it will always be there.