Brooks on family

A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain

David Brooks leans in to a perception that seemed new to me in yesterday's NY Times, the sense that the American family is falling apart. He's not the only one to say it, I suppose, but as someone whose tussles with parents are somewhere behind me--and someone who doesn't presently feel all that much animosity from our children--the claim that the divide between parents and children in this country is somehow catastrophic is not only new but somehow shocking.

Times change, he says, and so do definitions. What is considered abuse today was relatively commonplace in earlier eras--like corporal punishment in school. Such shifts stem from a new sense of family: once upon a time, he says, it was a tightly organized society of mutual obligation; families thrive on obligations, what we owe each other and need to give up to get along. Today, obligations are simply assumed to be restraints on personal freedom; families are "launching pads" for your and my identity quests. People don't ask themselves what they can do for their family, but what can their families should do for them.

I think the world of David Brooks' ideas and opinions, but I wasn't convinced of the depth of darkness he sees in American families. And then he unloaded with some horrors:

Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.

You can't file through all of that and not feel some pain and heartache. It seems he's not wrong: for reasons he tries to uncover, we're suffering a level of alienation from each other that is clearly verifiable.

Then he comes outs himself in a way one doesn't find in a year of op-ed pieces: "I confess, I don't understand what's causing this." To admit what he does is humbling and helpful.

He doesn't say it, but his final paragraphs suggests that if we'd like to, it wouldn't be all that difficult to understand the enormous and stupefying (to some of us) attraction of a religion like Q-Anon because, like any religion, it demands "my soul, my life, my all." It restores responsibilities and negates rights. 

Q-Anon brings people together with a mantra, it outfits them with a uniform, gives them a common language, creates a common enemy, and blesses its adherents with an eschaton that feels unquestionably holy.

But Brooks isn't exploring the intimacies of Q-Anon or blaming Donald Trump, he's only documenting a phenomenon he's outlined--the alienation that plagues us, even though--and maybe because--we are the richest nation in the world.

Finally, in one deft line, he "maybes," toys with a possible religious answer to our aloneness by quoting Richard Rohr: " if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it."

How he concludes seems a century away from "turn your eyes upon Jesus," or any of a thousand other Sunday School tunes, but in substance it's not much different.

David Brooks is always worth reading.

TSC to the rescue

Okay, tell you what--let's start here: it ain't going to happen. The man here celebrated (why don't we call him the MHC) simply will not re-choose his battle-worn running mate because EXVP leaked out on him on January 6th, when the EXVP presided over the Senate confirmation of an election that, for the MHC, went south, despite his endless belly-aching. Should the MHC run again 2024--however unlikely that is--he will not enlist the EXVP to come along side and bootlick as he so sweetly did before. EXVP jilted him. Period. EXVP is out. There's no reason to keep the sign up. It's an anchronism. 

But the sign I can't help but see daily, stays. Drives me nuts.

So the MCH + EXVP is not going to happen, even though the guy down the road (GDR) might well call the whole thing his fondest dream (HFD). So here's the story: the GDR keeps HFD up along the road, even though the insurrection is already half a year in the past and the election which fifty or sixty judges ruled valid ended last November. Pathetically, the sign, HFD, is still out there proudly lauding the MHC and the EXVP. Sick. Really.

 

It's out there every day I drive west into town. Every day. Every night. If I could not see it, I'd be blessed; but I can't not see it, because I can't help but think--as I have for four long years and more, that the ticket HFD continues to celebrate just about ran our country into the ground. What's more, it seems the air is slowly seeping out of the GDR's FD. It's a lost cause, and a damned one at that.

 

However, I wouldn't doubt that GDR feels less likely to pull up HFD and do away with it. After all, he's got an investment in HFD. With his blasted HFD, the GDR has been preaching the glory of the MHC the for more than a year. I can't help but believe the GDR is even more taken with HFD now than he was when he first put it up, a year ago. "In your face," he says, every time I drive by. "Stick it, buddy." He's talking to me--or at least HFD is. And he ain't going to quit.

I wish it weren't true, but I can't look away. HFD obliterates everything else so completely that I can't help but think--and I'm not happy to admit it--that his devotion is as passionate as my derision. Okay, let me come clean here--my hate is as intense as his love.

Up until yesterday, all I saw was the blasted sign; but yesterday I saw the GDR for the very first time. I'd never seen him before. He was retrieving his mail and crossing the highway. He's thin, angular, seemed almost human. I almost pulled the pickup over on the shoulder because while HFD is always planted sturdily in his yard, I'd never really seen the GDR. And there he was, in the flesh. 

What flashed through my mind was a verse from the Bible, the decalogue--you know, Exodus 20, the Sixth Commandment (TSC). Thank goodness for a conscience.

When TSC appeared (imagine a small plane pulling a sign across the sky) a still small voice reminded me that what my instincts were toying with was way, way, way out of bounds. 

Here's my confession of sin: yesterday, TGR was saved by the TSC and so was I.  

Now if I could only dig out HFD.

To be content

It might be fanciful. No one who was there was alive when the book was written, but let's just assume that the writer did her homework and wasn't making things up. I don't doubt for a moment that she researched the ritual; it wouldn't have been impossible to find out what, exactly, was said at something as important to the Omaha people as a naming ritual--and this child, after all, was the headman's daughter, Suzette LaFlesche, daughter of Joseph Iron Eye LaFlesche. 

Just before she goes into the tent where she will meet the head-dressed priest of the Omaha's religion, Suzette's mother prays: "I desire for my daughter to walk long upon the earth. I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

The line sticks with me for some reason, perhaps because it would be difficult for me to imagine any mother I know to bring her son or daughter before the God and ask of him a similar request: "I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

Her praying for blessing is as universal as the dawn, but what most of us want in and from our children--and grandchildren--is to be exceptional in some way, to win, to succeed, to rise to the top of the ladder by buckling up her bootstraps and taking on the world. We want happiness, sure, but we want it to come by way of success. We'd like action, not passivity. 

We want our children to win, not just get along. It seems a peculiar petition, to ask God to bless our kids with contentedness. Cows are content. I couldn't help thinking that that Native mom's request didn't seem at all natural. We thrive on competition, as does nature itself. 

You don't have to be an evolutionist to know the truth of natural selection. When wolves get hungry, they eat whatever they can bring down, the animal that is slowest or weakest. Only the strong survive, right? 

Two small colleges exist side-by-side out here in the northwest college of Iowa. They are remarkably similar; in fact, only a native knows anything about their differences--and those differences are almost entirely historic, back there somewhere in a history that neither care much about. They both sell themselves and attempt to be "Christian" colleges, and both struggle in the present climate, demographic charts dangerously pointed at a smaller and smaller student base. 

I once told the President of one of them that I thought it would be not only gracious but prudent for the two colleges to think about sharing facilities and faculty when it was possible. He shook his head. "Competition is good for both of us," he said. 

And he's likely right, at least partly right. That's what I was thinking about--how important competition is to our way of life and how odd it would be to hear a loving mother asking God to bless her daughter with being content. 

Case in point?--the world's attention is set in Tokyo right now, the Olympics, where competition is measured in hundredths of seconds, where the difference between taking home the gold and going home a loser is can be shown only on photograph taken at a finish line. 

Stories galore emanate from any Olympic competition. There's the shocking story of Linda Jacoby, a 17-year-old swimmer from Seward, Alaska, hardly a swimmer's haven, to win the gold in the 100 breast-stroke. And there's the incredible story of Simone Biles, the marquee Olympian representing the USA, whose body simply wouldn't do what it supposed to do, what it had practiced for so long and so hard and so competitively for years already, refusing to twist the 2 1/2 times it was supposed to, hampered by a condition gymnasts call "the twisties." 

When it happened, she failed and quit, not because she failed but because she understood that what was in her wasn't going to be enough to bring her to the excellence that's typified her routines for so long. 

Was it a physical problem? She said no. It was a mental problem. Her failure was spectacularly newsworthy because so completely unexpected. She's made of tough stuff, after all. She's practiced her life away. She's accomplished things on the mat that thousands of others could only have dreamed of. Then, she feels "the twisties" and pulls on her sweats? Really. 

There is no question that competitions sharpens us, toughens us, makes some of us champions. But Suzette LaFleshe's mother wasn't letting her daughter down by asking God to help her be content. Being able to live with yourself is no small blessing. 

Consider this too--when Simone Biles didn't finish that 2 1/2, she didn't run into the locker room and bawl. She pulled on her sweats and went right back out to cheer on her teammates. We should be proud of the strength of her contentedness.

Morning Thanks--An Alaskan Gallery

Indigenous Alaskans

Sea Lions (look closely)

Generic Alaskan landscape

Generic Alaskan landscape (2)

Alaska's state bird--from the pigeon family

May as well be Alaskan state mammal 

Captain James Kidd, 17th century explorer

The death of Captain Kidd

Denali--what we could see of it

So much awe and beauty all around

Glacier

Denali resident grizzily

from "The Spit," Homer

So much beauty, so much space, so much awe. 

Morning Thanks--an odd cemetery

It's little more than a roadside stop, and, unfortunately for us, it was mostly closed up when we stopped--the gift shop and church at least. The grounds were open and greatly mysterious without having done any research.

In northern Minnesota, we'd once traveled through the Red Lake Ojibwa Reservation with a man who called the place home. One of the places he brought us was to a cemetery where loved ones did the deceased the honor of building little houses over their gravesites, almost like you see here. Without more information, it was difficult for me to understand what was going on because the little cemetery--still accepting newcomers, obviously--seemed goofy, something of a toy village.

The place is called Eklutna Historical Village, not all that far from Anchorage, home of the oldest building (origins somewhat unknown) in the region, the church--

a Russian Orthodox Church. The combo seemed incongruous--a strange and unique cemetery that reminded me of Red Lake but was obviously arranged around a Christian church.

It is what I couldn't help thinking it was--a hybrid mix of cultures. The 600-year old place belongs to Native people, the Dena’ina Athabascans, who were visited long, long ago--1840s?--by Orthodox missionaries from Russia. Some folks still worship in the church (a newer one, actually), but the graves are covered in an ancient, Native way, with brightly painted "spirit houses" intended to provide shelter to the spirits of the dead, a notion, I'm quite sure, they didn't pick up from Christian missionaries.

Loved the place, even in its inelegance. It offers witness to the kind of cross-cultural melding that can and does take place among diverse peoples who refashion themselves to the shapes of new inspirations, new faith. The Denai'ina Athabascan people worship in a Christian church but bury their loved ones in a way that predates--by hundreds of years perhaps--the traditions of the missionaries.

Loved the strange place because I couldn't help noticing the redolence of hope is simply all around. That redolence of hope is always worthy of our thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds--Awesome

They who dwell in the ends of the earth 

stand in awe of your signs;

You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy. Psalm 65:8

Just exactly what are "the ends of the earth," I suppose, varies with whoever recites the line. To some, it's here, the far northwest corner of a state known primarily for corn. To others, it's some woebegone corner deep in the darkest corner of the Amazon rain forest or some unreachable height in the Himalayas. Having just left Alaska, I'd suggest any of the hundreds of rugged wilderness places we just left fit the bill, despite the fact that Alaska is where, ironically, the "ends" of the earth may most closely approximate the earth's very beginnings. 

Alaska doesn't have to cordon off its wildernesses because they're not likely to become "developed," as we say. If the place were to be somehow affixed to the western edge of the lower 48, we call San Francisco the Middle West--it's that vast. If January temperatures weren't enough of a hinderance, the dark night of midwinter would be cause enough to stay away. 

Because it is so formidable, the place is draw-dropping. It's difficult to imagine anyone not being silenced at a thousand turnouts along Alaskan highways. The landscape devours whatever the human imagination can conjure; it's so huge it seems endless.

The Denali guide that drove us through the park proclaimed joyously that the passengers in her bus were blessed like few others--maybe 80 percent of those she takes through never see "the mountain," McKinley/Denali itself. We did, some of it anyway; the tallest peak in North America is only rarely left bare naked by clouds that bedeck its peaks. It's here in all its pomp and circumstance--or at least this is what we could see of it. 

It's hard to be prideful when you're almost anywhere in Alaska. The world is not only big, it's magnificent, so huge it rescues the word awesome from the cliché it's become. Hundreds of thousands of silenced tourists are somewhere in Alaska right now, as there will be most of the year, even mid-winter, and lots of them, right now, are just stunned.

And what of the aboriginals, the real locals, who sit and stand imaginatively, the heathen of old-fashioned mission hymns? What did they know about creation's magnificence, and when did they know it, the folks Captain Kidd stumbled on in his remarkable travels?

If we believe the psalmist, living in the daily presence of all of that glory, it may well be that they believed and knew more than we might believe or even imagine about the Source of all the magnificence around them. 

Faith begins, Calvin said, in the kind of awe that Alaska wears as work clothes: "It begins when we come to grips with the hard lesson that we're not much at all when we stand somewhere in the bold, magnificent presence of God."

And He said, “Behold, I make a covenant. Before all thy people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among whom thou art shall see the work of the Lord, for it is a fearsome thing that I will do with thee. Exodus 34:10.

In Alaska especially, it's just plain difficult not to recognize that this world is not our own, that we belong to it and to him, the Creator and Redeemer. 

Even the ends of the earth magnify his name. Pull over sometime and have a look yourself.

 

Sunday Morning Meds--

Guide me in your truth and teach me,

for you are God my Savior,

and my hope is in you all day long. Psalm 25

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass just thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me from a memory that will not die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there at that spot is pain and anger, and the incident that triggers it happened decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. That night, she cried herself to perilous sleep, nearly refused to go back to school the next day, and wouldn’t eat for a weekend. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did; she’d once been a middle-school girl herself.

Why that incident rises specter-like from mowing a certain section of backyard is Twilight Zone-ish, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable: it’s anger, no, rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid who kicked her out and the kid’s parents, and that hate found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to college, marriage, a career, and is today the mother of three. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do her parents, who themselves are as proud of their kids as we are of ours. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father, by a memory I do not control. I get mad.

Not long ago I visited a classroom where students had been required to read stories I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned as colorfully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories was like turning back the pages of an emotional journal I don’t keep but was kept for me by something mysterious in my heart or soul—I don’t know which.

There’s a great deal of shame in Psalm 25, and not a whole lot of trust. Of shame, David wants less; of trust he’s claims he needs so much more.

The roads we travel get planted with IEDs, some of which we bury ourselves. When I go captive to some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit to deal with the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, in our minds and hearts, more considerable darkness than I might know.

“Guide me in your truth and teach me,” David says, “for you are God my Savior,/and my hope is in you all day long.”

Even when I’m cutting my lawn.

 On vacation, "north to Alaska." If I can, I'll send some pix!

The Prospects from Prospect Hill (iv)

 

It's formidable but obscure, prominent but hidden, memorable, but somehow forgettable--much ado about very little maybe. Most of Sioux City has absolutely no idea it's there, even though it sits at a place that once offered reverence. When I dropped by, no one else was around. I was likely the sole visitor all day, despite perfect sunshine. 

The fine monument celebrates three men no one in town remembers, men who embarked on a mission that departed a Sioux City that, back then, thought of itself as the doorstep to a wildly dangerous frontier--"Rev. Sheldon Jackson, Rev. T. H. Cleland, and Rev. J. C. Elliott."

Sadly, Preacher Eliot doesn’t Google well. Cleland went up to Alaska, but is remembered for his commitment to education, higher education here in the lower 48.

This Sheldon Jackson may be forgotten in Sioux City and on Prospect Hill, but the man wrote his own story elsewhere, most specifically in Alaska. No, he didn’t win the west for Christ as promised, but “the flying horseman of the Rockies,” as some called him, gave it a heckuva whirl.

 Sometime before his seminary days at Princeton, Sheldon Jackson, a blue blood if ever there was one, got himself called into Christian missions, which was, mid-19th century, as adventurous an occupation as any. When he was turned down for the foreign mission field (he was slight, not much over five feet tall, and a bit pale), he ventured out to a frontier inhabited only by Indians and mountain men with fur hats and huge knives, what the church called “exceptional populations.”

 After his first miserable year among the Choctaw, he kept going west by horseback, railroad, Conestoga, and, when necessary, on foot, planting churches wherever he went—like Johnny Appleseed, sometimes one a day.

 When Jackson arrived to start a church in Grand Island, mosquitoes were so heavy that an hour before the very first meeting a man with a smudge smoked them out of the building. But they returned with a pitiful vengeance and the few who’d gathered, and Jackson himself, threw up their hands and left, but not before electing an elder or two and putting down a foundation for a frontier church.

Jackson traveled to whatever open spaces still existed, eventually to Alaska, meanwhile birthing Christian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to the Native people, doing what he promised when he and his two cohorts prayed so dutifully up on our own Prospect Hill. The Reverend Sheldon Jackson went out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is comic understatement. On one of his trips, he met Capt. Michael A. Healy, the first and only African-American to captain a Coast Guard ship, a man known as “Hell-Roaring Mike.”

 An odd couple if there ever was one, the two of them saw the starving Aleuts and Inuits, men, women, and children who were dying, literally, by way of goods and ills sold to them by colonizing white men.

 I am not making this up. Captain Healy and Reverend Jackson literally saved indigenous people from starvation and death by buying domesticated reindeer from the Siberians, and then--no one thought it possible--bringing dozens, eventually hundreds, across the perilous Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska on a ship named Bear, then introducing them into the land of the Inuit and Aleuts, not simply for food, but for use in a thousand ways, not unlike Great Plains Native people using every square inch of buffalo.

Give folks a reindeer, and they'll eat for a week--how does that old line go?--give them a herd and they'll create an industry.

The Reverend Sheldon Jackson preached the Good News, but also he delivered goods that let people live. 

He’s one of the men whose name is etched on the Prospect Hill memorial, First and Bluff. You can see for yourself any time you feel tugged up the hill. As far as I know, he never preached a sermon in Sioux City, but he left a mark. Just thought you might like to know.

Tromp up there sometime. You’ll love the view.

Sunday Morning Meds--Hidden Faults

“clear thou me from hidden faults” Psalm 19:12

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass in my backyard, thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me that some lingering memory in me will not let die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there is shock, anger, envy, and pain. And the incident that triggers it happened decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was quite unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. That night, she cried for an entire day, nearly refused to go back to school, and wouldn’t eat. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did—she’d once a middle-school girl herself.

Why that incident rises specter-like from my mowing a certain section of backyard is Hitchcockian, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable—it’s anger, no rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things about which he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid and her parents, and that hate apparently found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to high school, college, marriage, a career, and mother of three beautiful kids. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do our friends, themselves just as proud grandparents as we are. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father by a memory I absolutely do not control. Makes no sense.

Not long ago I was visiting a classroom where students were required to read some stories I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned, as fully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories were like turning back the pages in an emotional journal I don’t actually keep but is nonetheless mysteriously kept for me by something in my mind or my heart or my soul—I don’t know which.

Maybe I’m going too far here. Maybe what David intends in this prayerful petition is simply that the Lord clean out those sins he’s not aware of, those sins of omission. We all have those too, at least I do.

But when I become captive of some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit, and of the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, even in our own minds and hearts.

"Whatever’s there," David begs, "clean it up."  Whatever I’m forgetting or missing or not acknowledging, make it shine, Lord. Forgive me. That’s what’s he’s saying. "Make it shine."

Prospects on Prospect Hill (iii)

 

The "Five Civilized Tribes" on the Trail of Tears weren't dressed in breech cloths. Some wore suits and dresses. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the Southern states for some time, more assimilated into American culture than you might imagine. But they’d become, as all Native people were to white folks, "in the way," so President Jackson and his own Congressional hostiles moved them out to what would become Oklahoma. Of the 15,000 Creeks, 3500 were buried on the trail.

They’d all come from Dixie, where they’d owned the land they’d farmed and were often wealthy enough to own slaves they brought with them to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and slave-holders alike were soon impoverished. The Omaha people lived in fear of being deported; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.

A man named Alexander Reid, a graduate of Princeton, took a teaching position after seminary and was sent to the Spencer School in Indian Territory, a school for Choctaw boys. In the years before the Civil War, Reid got to know an ex- slave couple named Wallace and Minerva Willis, who had belonged to a Choctaw slave holder, but were given to Rev. Reid for employment at the school.

I would never have heard of Alexander Reid if it weren’t for Sheldon Jackson, one of the three names inscribed on Sioux City’s Prospect Hill, First and Bluff. Sheldon Jackson’s first position after seminary was at that same Spencer School. That’s the only link there is to our own Prospect Hill monument, but when you stumble on stories this good, you just have to tell ‘em.

Old Wallace and Minerva Willis were pure delight to school boys, who loved to hear their "plantation songs," the spirituals they took along from the cotton fields. After supper, the Willises would sit together out on their porch and sing through a repertoire Rev. Reid himself grew to admire so greatly he took down lyrics and melodies because he didn't want those great melodies forgotten once Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped singing altogether.

When Reid's wife died, he left Oklahoma and returned to New Jersey, where one night he attended a concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers--all "plantation songs." When it was over, the Fisk choirmaster told the audience where they'd be singing over the weekend, then noted that what the choir had offered that night were all the songs they knew. If people decided to attend another concert, they shouldn't be sad to hear the same songs. That’s all they had, he said.

Alexander Reid sauntered up later and told the singers he knew songs as beautiful as anything he’d heard. From memory, he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including pieces called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away,” and more.

You’ve heard them maybe?

For decades, ethnographers have insisted that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than they were lightly disguised, heartfelt slave dreams of freedom. 

I'd like to think those ethnologists are right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may be as much a wish for freedom as it is for heaven's glory. Whatever import may be in those call-and-response lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"—the history records that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's blessed melodies in their concerts, including the concert they gave later in England for Queen Victoria.

From an evening hymn on the porch of two beloved Choctaw ex-slaves in Indian Territory, all the way across the pond to the royals at Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" became one of the most beloved melodies in world musical literature.

I don't know that we can tell that story often enough or hear those hymns, all about the triumph of hope on each of our own Trails of Tears.

The Prospects on Prospect Hill (ii)

 

The only way to get to the Prospect Hill monument is a map or GPS. There is no signage to speak of, and the monument isn't what you might call stunning. It's big, but not huge. Both itself and what it commemorates seems little more than a footnote. Go on up and read it for yourself.

It memorializes a moment when three stout-souls pledged themselves to eternal designs and determined to leave Prospect Hill for what lay hugely beyond, what they would have called “the unconquered west.”

On Prospect Hill, Sheldon Jackson, T.C. Cleland and J.C. Elliott, strict Presbyterians all, pledged in prayer to beget a campaign, as the monument still claims, to “win the west for Christ."

Let that sit for a minute. Seriously!—with good, old-fashioned zeal, they determined “to win the west for Christ.”

Fifty-some years later, in 1923, thoughtful Presbyterians honored those prayers and created a wide white monument that still sits on an oddly cut parcel of ground, high--high!--above the city and the river that created it, a monument that gives those missionaries grand billing: "who on April 29, 1869, from this hill top viewed the great unchurched areas and after prayer went out to win the west for Christ."

So genuinely American! In 1869, Prospect Hill stood high above a river town that had begun to sell itself as the jumping off place, the "last stop," for an unending train of emigrant settlers going west. Most had no interest in winning anything for Christ; they just wanted a better life. Some, just as noteworthy as the pastors, felt called to a similar task with a wholly different end--to win the west for their pocketbooks. But they were all going out west to land white America thought it deserved—a matter of Manifest Destiny.

In 1874, a rowdy Sioux City newspaper editor named Charles Collins began a nationwide crusade to drum up a thousand people--as many as he could enlist--to strike out from here to the Black Hills, flouting the law. The Ft. Laramie Treaty, a year earlier, had granted possession of the Black Hills to the Great Sioux Nation; but Collins, et al, could honor nothing but gold. When Custer's explorations let it be known that the Black Hills had gold, entrepreneurs like our own Charles Collins trumpeted the call. “A treaty, you say? Who wants to get rich? Hey, come on along.”

An old photo of Prospect Hill makes all of this perfectly visible. There are no houses and it’s treeless, nothing but windswept bluffs outfitted as far as you can see in knee-high grasses waving in the winds all of us know are simply always there. Imagine what all of them see, Collins and the Presbyterians--no farms, no groves, no dwellings of any kind, maybe even a small herd of buffalo. Nothing was out there. Nothing. Sioux City was perfectly positioned to be the nation’s biggest and last truck stop for thousands of emigrant prairie schooners.

That’s what the three of them saw. That’s how all of them dreamed.

Those two missions to win the west went to battle in a hundred small towns and mining camps that grew from the prospects of a great, unexplored frontier just west of us, a land filled with nothing but opportunity and a few savages who would have either to get with the program or wiped out.

In the middle of the 20th century, the soft sandstone of Prospect Hill got worn away by wind and rain, putting that strange old monument at risk. That’s when it was moved to where it stands today, still teasingly close to that brimming overlook Leonias once halfway blundered down.

It's an amazing place really, a sliver of land amid a handful of dwellings that appear to have lost some energy. Once, only the wealthy could afford a place on Prospect Hill. That time has passed.

If you ask me, the monument is still a wonder. There’s far more history here than that included even in its own grand ambitions. In an odd way, it still tells our story.

Prospects from Prospect Hill (1)

It wasn't upkept--I'll say that much. The grass could have used a trim, but the city is keeping it up adequately, as well they should. It stands at the very top of Prospect Hill, where once some obscure Sioux City history was created. The Prospect Hill Monument, as it’s called, remembers an event 152 years ago, an event that today wouldn’t get a Journal headline. 

If you stand beside it, then take a few steps southward to the edge of the bluff, the view is extraordinary—Sioux City bustling away in three states, each visible beyond the winding river and its interstate sidekick. The South Sioux bridge is right beneath you, and a couple hundred cars and trucks. Prospect Hill offers one busy cityscape.

You can see for miles. But nothing out there is the same as it was in 1869, when the “monumental” event occurred. Not even Old Muddy. Without a doubt, the river would have been more braided and far less drawn-and-quartered by upstream dams. It could be placid enough, I’m sure, mid-summer; but the longest river in America, rain-swollen, was often a dirty rascal.

Just a few hundred souls lived here then. Sioux City was a barely established frontier village, home to a French-Canadian named, rather impossibly, Theophile Brugeiur, who with his two wives—daughters of War Eagle—raised thirteen kids.

The story goes that another French-Canadian, Joseph Leonais, a trapper who’d run the river for fur companies so often he knew every inlet, the guy Leonais fell in love with the good land at the mouth of the Floyd.

People say Leonais knocked on the door of the only log cabin in the neighborhood and was delighted to find an old good-times-on-the-river buddy Brugeiur, who’d put down roots of his own nearby. Leonais wanted a chunk of that good land and made an offer--$100 for 160 acres. That land is downtown Sioux City.

The Sioux City Museum says what’s to come may be legend, but let’s just pretend I didn’t say that--the story is too much fun. Once the land deal was set, a party followed at which Leonias tipped some considerable homemade brew so when he left his host’s cabin, Brugieur wondered if his buddy would find his way back. Thoughtfullly, he sent out one of his thirteen kids to bring Leonais-the-plastered back safely.

As you can guess, I wouldn’t be telling the tale if it didn’t bring us to Prospect Hill, First Street and Bluff, right here in town. Leonais, three sheets to the wind, saw the kid coming and figured he wanted to race, so he kicked his trusty mount into high gear and took off—ON PROSPECT HILL.

Not smart.

Off the cliff he went, arse over tea kettle as Theophile might have said—or the French equivalent.

Miraculously, Joe had an unexpected encounter with a mulberry bush that saved his life, while his horse tumbled down the bluff and drowned in the shivery river below. 

Now, that monument up on Prospect Hill—it’s still there--has absolutely nothing to do with Joseph Leonais and Theophile Brugeiur, who sound like biblical characters, but weren’t, to be sure.

And that old alabaster monument, forgotten but not forsaken, has wholly different origins, as we shall see in a some upcoming “Small Wonder(s).”

That great forgotten monument is dedicated not to drunken pioneers and their mulberries, but three preachers who didn’t get snookered, but gathered right there on Prospect Hill to pray—that’s right, to pray.  

Seriously. That’s what the monument says. Climb up there sometime, have a look, read the print, wander over to the side of the bluff, take a few seconds to honor an imaginary mulberry bush full of Joe Leonais’.

There’s a monument there on First and Bluff, holy ground.

More to come. Stay tuned.

"Tumultuous Privacy"

[Pardon me if I think about winter right now, but it's been so blame hot that yesterday, mid-day, just the thought of going out back and tending the garden made me recoil. Here's some thoughts during a snowstorm, December, 2007.] 

I keep telling myself it's not just a matter of age. I'm sitting here in the basement when I should be somewhere out on the road, on my way to Worthington, MN, an hour's drive. But the wind is howling outside--I know, I've been out there. And the snow is driving--and I'm not. I decided against it. If I was 35, I'd likely be out there bucking snowbanks.

 But the snowbanks themselves, still little more than swells across the road, are hard; and when the Aurora (some mythology there, I'd guess) bounced over them just now, the argument for not going, for staying home, got stronger and stronger. The howling wind is from the south, there's warm air coming, the snow will turn eventually into what forecasters call "a wintry mix," which is, I'm telling myself, even more treacherous than just plain driving snow. Ice will make it rough to get there and worse to get home, I told myself. Even if I had arrived, I'm honestly not interested in spending all day somewhere other than here, not when I've got too much to do in the basement.

So here I sit in in silence, in exactly what Emerson famously called "the tumultuous privacy of storm," a simply gorgeous oxymoron. And it feels good. I don't think I want to be out there, but what remains of my own romantic self still spits out a reprimand: "Yeah, well, if you were younger, you know you would have gone."

Heart and head, heart and head--if we knew how to negotiate those dischordant voices, we'd be something other than we are, human beings, frail and given sadly to the horror of second-guessing silliness.

Chalk this decision up to head, not heart. Chalk it up to experience, not daring. Chalk it up to wisdom, not glory. Two roads diverged in an open field before me, and I took the one more traveled, not less, and it won't make much of a difference anyway because the speech is rescheduled for next week.

 And so, soon enough, I'll take off my professional attire and wander back upstairs to bed, where my wife will appreciate my return, I'm sure.

I remember, years ago, when my father told me how much he liked going back to bed after being up for awhile. I remember him quoting an old guy named Chet, who worked in the office where he did, a man who once told him that there wasn't another kind of warmth in life that was quite as good as the warmth his wife would offer when he'd crawl back in bed. "It's like nothing else," that old man told him, my father--at the time--probably much younger than I am now.

 And I remember thinking it surprising that my father would share that same enthusiasm, my father who'd never really told me much at all about the joy of love, its warmth and comfort. It was surprising to hear him talk about my mother that way--I'm sure that's why I remember. And yet, I found his telling me that story remarkably warm in and of itself. He knew. Not only that, the old guy in the office did too. The song I thought I'd sung alone had already been composed for a choir, a whole men's chorus.

One of my own ex-students and I have been keeping up a conversation lately. She's seeing someone, and he's interested in writing. The way she describes it, I don't think I'd be wrong to say that writing, for him, must be a passion. She's nurturing this relationship in all sorts of ways, I imagine--one of them being asking her old prof what kinds of writing I might suggest him to read. She says her old prof and this man she's seeing, also an academic, have similar interests. Okay, I'm honored in the request--I admit it.

This morning, she told me that she was fully capable of talking about other things too--she wanted me to know she was still fully capable of multi-tasking. I mean, her e-mails have been almost totally about this guy. She didn't want me to think that was all that was going on in her life--she's finishing a masters, in fact.

Okay, okay--I told her. No matter. I loved the music in her tale. I smile when I read her notes. Honestly, it's a joy just to hear her talk. Not that she goes on and on about this guy's virtues or whatever--it's just a small, good thing to hear her care for him. Honestly, it's a blessing.

So this morning I told her as much. One of the benefits of being around kids is that you get to watch 'em fall in love. And I don't care how old I get--that's always something worth observing. I'm not sure it keeps me young, but it sure enough keeps me smiling. So don't apologize. Just keep it coming, I told her.

That having been said, I'm done. I quit for now. Outside, the wind is howling, the snow is crystallizing, and down here in the basement I keep telling myself that I made the right decision in staying here, staying home. There's always a next week.

I've said enough. I'm going back to bed because, as an old guy named Chet used to tell my father, there's no warmth quite like what awaits me in the bed where my wife, as I speak, is waiting. No warmth at all.

I ought to tell my ex-student that, like my own father did; but what's life itself without, now and then, some precious discoveries of one's own.

 And thus ends the reflections of an old man who lacked the chutzpah to take an hour's drive--or more--in the snow this morning, who listened to his head, not his heart, who took the road more traveled.

 Call me a chicken. I'm not repenting. Right now, I've got a preciously warm place in this morning's "tumultuous privacy of storm" and that's enough to warm the heart.

Top Tier TV

 

One major theme to the whole story is as inescapable, even doctrinal: war is hell. What makes A French Village so unique and powerful is how that theme is developed, in what region of warfare. The story begins with a German fighter plane  spraying an open field with bullets for no good reason, killing two children and a teacher who happen to be on an school outing. Otherwise, what is horrifyingly hellish about the war, the Second World War, in A French Village is generated by the Nazi occupation of the place, their insane hatred for Jews and their penchant for blood when their authority is compromised. Their rule is evil, and, finally, that rule turns everyone and everything around them, an entire French Village, evil.

Left to right, it goes like this. There's Marchetti, a French cop thrust into compromise the moment the Nazis arrive, pushed to play their game despite the fact that his lover is Jewish. He murders a German soldier to insure her escape to Switzerland. Then, there's Lucienne, the school teacher who survives that strafing only to fall in love with a sweet German soldier, a relationship that, of course, ends in disaster and darkens every single moment of her life thereafter.

Marie, whose purity of motive and determination slowly brings her to leadership in the developing Resistance movement. Marie loves love and hates war, but fights with such tenacity that, when circumstances dictate choice, she even kills her husband, almost justifiably in war. But then all motives are mixed here, her husband happens to be a man she does not love. 

The man in the cap is Marcel, the martyred, so committed to his Marxism that he abandons his boy, his son, after the death of his beloved wife. 

The couple in the foreground spend very little time as a couple, although they are rarely apart. Hortense falls for an SS officer who, when he initially appears, seems to enjoy brutality and torture. They are an unlikely pairing--the Mayor's wife and the icon of Nazi horror. But skilled writers make it work. Her husband, a doctor appointed mayor when the German forces roll in, is a man determined to make the best moral choices in the hell created by war. But sometimes, plainly, there are none. He takes refuge from his wife's infidelity by finding love with his Jewish housekeeper, who, we discover, does not survive Auschwitz.

Raymond Schwarz is a businessman committed to making do during whatever the occupation means by continuing to provide employment for the community despite the fact that the work his company does supports the German war effort. His wife is the most truly despicable character of the series--her Parisian family has money and power enough to keep her insulated from the horrors that beset others. When she faces moral choices, she simply decides to do what fits her needs and her security. She's malevolent, as bad as the SS. Maybe worse.

There are others, not pictured, whose impact is substantial. Heinrich Mueller, of the SS, is addicted to torture and morphine because of the war wound taken in the First World War. Jules, the school's principal, finds himself almost by accident, hip-deep in the Resistance. He marries a woman, his teacher, to protect her from the repercussions of her secret liaison with a German soldier. And Gustave, the son of the dedicated communist, who grows up during the occupation, loses both parents and ends up murdering an American soldier.

You might be surprised to know that there are a dozen episodes set after the war, even though during the early seasons you can't help hoping for the invasion at Normandy. A French Village was a massive undertaking, but it has to be, at least by my judgement, one of the greatest television series in media history. Every last moment is riveting, so riveting that, as I said, I kept hoping for June 6, 1944, which, when finally it happened, didn't end the drama. 

The major theme is war is hell, but what was missing in the range of powerful rolls was a Christian. To someone, like me, whose quantity of stories of the occupation have leading ladies like Corrie Ten Boom and Diet Eman, what the writers of the series didn't have include was someone whose resistance work was generated by the Nazi's evident violations of God's law, their insane hatred of Jewish people, their disregard for the sanctity of life, their hate, the absence of love. 

When Diet Eman and her fiance, Hein Sietsma, began their resistance work, it started with the painful realization that God's own law would not allow them the to look past what was happening all around them in Holland. They did what they did because their God, in his word, made clear that to tolerate the evil ran counter to the love of God. 

That kind of character is not part of the resistance in A French Village. There's a church all right, but it has little real power or authority. Evidence exists all over to suggest that the French Huguenots, the Protestants, were far more involved in the Resistance in France than were the Roman Catholics. Why? I'll let the sociologists and theologians offer answers to that. 

What I'm saying is that some resistance fighters were motivated by something other than patriotism, ideology, or simply staying alive. After the war, heroes rise in A French Village, but none of them wore haloes--and I think I know that some underground fighters were saints in occupied Europe. 

But not in A French Village. War shaped all of them all into opportunists, often because there were no other good moral choices. At it's worst, The French Village is a dark place to live for seven seasons and 70-some episodes. I wish there'd been a little more light.

But it's immensely powerful television, a masterpiece of a series.