What's the point?

What poetry, even King David's, is good for is the bracing and blessed reminder that even in our darkest moments we're not as alone as we might believe. The human experience includes darkness so thick it's hard to believe others can have any idea how it feels to be on our knees. Poetry reminds us, in small and sometimes lovely ways, that there is a crowd of witnesses who know. They do. We're not alone.

Kim Stafford's "What For" showed up a couple of days ago, courtesy of the Writers Almanac. Goes like this:

What is beauty for—
sunset searing my soul
without thought or plan?

Why should beauty simply show up in our lives? in a couple of lonely corn stalks along the side of road on a gloomy January morning? What's the point of sunsets or dawns? of wonderfully sweet honey? of stones that get polished into luxury by the pounding sea?

Dawn green beauty, bee hum honey,
stone in hand so silky the long sea
worked centuries to ravish?

What's the point of beauty. For that matter, what's the point of pain? 

And what for pain—thorn
in heart for my hurt child,
dumb ache for my brother gone

thirty years, slow burn of disgrace
when I fail at what I am to do: to see
my country bruised and torn?

No matter what it's source--why is there pain? What's the point?

She pages through her own catalogue of human experience, from the blessings of beauty to the despair of war, from a handful of smooth stones to years--even lifetimes--of grief. What's it all for? Why am I here? What's the point?

A simple answer:

So, to make good things—
a song, a kind act, a friendship—
feed on beauty at every turn.

Okay, that's not bad. Had she stopped right there, after a stanza that begins like a sermon, with a so or a thusly or therefore, the poem might work up a smile, but not quite convince: "to make good things." If the poem stopped right there, it'll pass as a Hallmark card. 

But it doesn't end there:

And to make truth, feed on sorrows,
gnash their salty structures,
bite the bitter rind.

Can we really "make truth," can we ring joy from sorrow? Like it or not, she hints, it's what we do. It's our job, our calling, our mission: to wring truth and joy from "the bitter rind." That's the point. The writer's job--and all of ours really--is to make sense of it, to "make truth."

It's not the first q and a of the Westminster Catechism, but, in a way, I can't help thinking it is. 

Sunday morning med--Groanings

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .” Psalm 32:11

All day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the couple who used to live next door was cleaning out his deceased-father’s three-stall garage—old tools, old two by fours, old whatevers--creating a sprawling junk pyramid that attracted me for some shady reason, but, thankfully, I stayed away.

I couldn’t see the guy from where I sat, but whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior, I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile. The old man was an ace tinker-er and a pack rat to boot. It was a colossal job.

And creepy. The pile of stuff one accumulates throughout life is incredible. Before we moved, I’d used to think I'd like to move out of town like we have, somewhere where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. What kept me me from looking for another place, however, was the gargantuan task of moving, which would necessarily include the job my neighbor’s son was doing yesterday—tossing out mountains of really valuable stuff. Sure. I couldn’t do it.

There in my office, I was surrounded by things I couldn’t think of tossing, things that would, someday, be just so much crapola to my kids. Maybe I ought to buy one of those little gizmos that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a trophy I got for longest putt at a teachers’ tournament in Lafayette County, Wisconsin.” If they could identify it, I told mysellf, I’m sure they’d keep it.

Upstairs, I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in ye olden days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of them were published about the time the Mayflower set anchor off Massachusetts. When I’m gone, will anyone care about those ancient things?—or will they be the bill for yet another auction, where some anxious fancier will pick them up for peanuts and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies. It's an endless cycle.

Back then, maybe for the first time, that next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life’s detritus, something that, back then, would never have entered my mind but today, twenty years later, is painful and haunting because my wife and I are still sifting, even though we've moved--twice!!--since then.

By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all. Life is like licking honey from a thorn, someone told me recently. We all must go. All things must pass. Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it’s all got to go. My wife, even my children, and theirs—my beloved grandkids—nobody stays.

Like so many Bible verses for those of us steeped in them, the last verse of Psalm 32 barely makes a sound in din ongoing in my overextended life. It’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

Rejoice, David says, as do all believers. Rejoice and be glad. Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—the pile here in my office and the mess in my heart.

Rejoice! The Truth of the matter is we really never get tossed. 

Iconic Great Plains 2

 

This shot, from 2012, west of Hawarden, is yet another variation on theme. What's up the hill here is more than a solitary tree--there's three of them, and it's an abandoned cemetery. Three stones, wearied by time and passing seasons, are exactly what they're supposed to be--remembrances. 

This one (south of Highland) has a nice balance--the tree, a veteran of those seasons, takes over visually just as much as the radiant dawn behind it, all of which create some sweet teamwork in this story, an almost coordinated mix between character (the single tree) and setting (a beautiful but not overwhelming prairie dawn). 

And then there's this story. This cottonwood, rangy and monstrously old, was a long-time favorite. My use of past tense suggests where this story is going.

Isn't she something, huge and very much alone just a bit north and east of Lebanon. But then, like all living things, Ecclesiastes might say, all things must pass. Coming up on it in the winter of 2012 was dreadful, like losing a friend.

Truth be told, I've attended more than my share of funerals in the last twenty years, and when they've been friends, I miss 'em. Some put up a gallant fight, but the grim reaper comes for all of us.

That's enough on death and dying, so I'm going to cheat my way back to where all of this started--a single tree on a broad, almost endless plain--cheat because I'm not sure the Texas Hill Country counts as Great Plains. If it does, then this one is yet another take.

We've been from Siouxland long enough. Time to get home again. It's very early here, too early really for a good shot; and if you think you've been here before, you have--south of Highland along a road that really never gets smoothed.

I think I've been at this long enough. This once was taken in 2013, into my third year of retirement, I didn't go out with the camera all that often anymore because we moved out into the country. Hence, fewer icons. Here's one from 2014, on an endless Kansas prairie preserve, one of my all time faves. Not only is the sky a dream, the wave in the land--no, I didn't put it there--just sings, don't you think?

This one isfar closer to home, in the hills along the Little Sioux, south and east of Sutherland. I've been there a dozen times.

This is another favorite, even though the up-close tree has some good neighbors. It's taken on a frigid January morning just off Lake Oahe, the Missouri River, on the far east side of the Cheyenne River Reservation. The golden light is dawn's wonderful Midas touch.

I'm ranging again. Here's another from the Little Sioux River valley, not at all far away. It's like all the others, none quite the same. After the parade I've put up together here, this guy's squatty look makes you giggle. But it's beautiful, isn't it? And that's a good thing all by itself.

That's enough. I could go on for hours and hours, a sure sign of my old age. But how about we end tour with a story of a picture. 

It's hard to know what's most attractive about this shot. Once again, we've got a single tree atop a bare plain, a kissing cousin of the others, but there's more to the story. The perfect rows of corn stubble off to the left, for instance, and the wild and bright whites created by shapely drifts on the leeward side of the fence, not to mention the fence itself; and then the feature that made me get out of the car to get the best story--that lonesome trail of prints left behind by some deer, homeward bound in the winter's cold. 

Maybe I'm just dreaming. Who cares? It's all kind of there in this shot, just west of the Big Sioux one ice-cold January morning. 

I may have talked myself into something here. Thanks for staying with me.

More MAGA madness

Whether or not one can write fiction about the Holocaust is a stimulating question. That people can write such books goes without question. Been done, after all, and will continue to be done. Styron's Sophie's Choice creates a moment that, at least for me, has come to epitomize what I can grasp of the horror.

But the question remains. Does any approximation of the bloody madness that was Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz--does any attempt at imagining that madness even come close to the reality of what happened?

It's not difficult to understand why a Holocaust survivor might not want to speak of the experience or why hundreds of thousands wouldn't and didn't. Such silence could stem from sheer revulsion at remembering, but I've long believed a survivor's choice not to speak of the human suffering is created by the how hard it is to "explain," to describe, or to recreate something so unimaginable and inhuman.

Can it be done?--is a wonderful academic question. Simply to think about it expands the limitations of our understanding of what happened, and in Germany itself--how a nation of thoughtful people could buy into a madman's recipes for inhumanity. It's an academic question because Holocaust stories have been and still are being created about that horror, lots of them, today by people who weren't there, including me. 

Maybe one of the most significant classroom events of my teaching life happened in 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, fifty years after the liberation of concentration camps all over Europe. I created an ad hoc, night course, "The Literature of the Holocaust," that met once a week. We entertained a variety of speakers and survivors, and invited community participation. 

It's fair to say that one of the books became the class's favorite--Maus, by Art Spiegelman, a book difficult to describe because its genius seems sheer impossibility. It's a comic book. Art Spiegelman, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, wrote--and illustrated--a comic book about the Holocaust.

Impossible as it sounds, it works so well that Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992, when scholars far more distinguished than I am awarded it the nation's top literary prize. 

Last week, Tennessee's McMinn County School Board voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman's Maus. 10-0. 10-0. 10-0. Read it and weep.

Is Maus good reading material for a first-grader? Of course not. Third? Maybe a few. Fifth? We're getting close. But to ban Maus from McMinn County Schools is a despicable act too reminiscent of Nazi Germany itself, where book burning was a national sport. 

There's a movement afoot in this country that's as dangerous as it is hateful, as wrong-headed as it is vindictive, and it's done in the name of moral values, of purging schools of evil, of keeping things pure and clean and good, of "making America great again."

That movement is not only stupid, it's insane, and it's perpetuated by our own political leaders. It's madness, and, in the name of good, it's evil. 

 I hope and pray we somehow get through this madness.

Iconic Great Plains

Red Cloud, NE, 2002

Nobody thinks about the Great Lakes when seeing a picture like this one. It's just plain "Great Plains," iconic Great Plains.

Why? is a question that doesn't require genius. Because a broad stretch of land behind a solitary tree is essential plains stuff (somewhere east of Hudson, SD, 2003), or even this one in the icy cold of winter.

But I'm changing thing here (west of Sioux Center, 2004) because this shot actually features the frozen corn stubble, not the tree, which is little more than frame. Because this one gives starring role to what it does, the photograph is not as "iconic," not as Great Plains-ish, even though the stretch of farmland rolls out a long, long ways. Pardon the pun, but I think I'm going far afield, so let's get back to the subject--lone trees on the prairie--like this one, northeast of Lebanon (2005)--

(you've got to love that thunderhead sneaking up back there, treacherous, threatening beauty). 

I've tried to grab this shot dozens of times because it feels so iconic. I may well be the only person on earth who thinks this particular composition of tree and sky and stretch of land, at dawn, can be almost perfectly beautiful. 

There's a touch of horror here, so kill the chill and have a look at another, same spot of land, same untended dirt road, a month earlier, looking west, not east at dawn. 

Or this one, yet another (2008)--same land, different tree, one of my all-time favorites (there's no accounting for taste). 

I hate to go back to winter (it's going to be warmer today, after what seems like a long spell of cold), but I've always liked the shimmering silver of this shot from 2008, just west of Sioux Center. The tree is gone today. It's called progress, I guess.

Or how about this?--a variation on theme--a pair of twins out on a sweet stretch of land not far from Beloit, Iowa (2009), late spring (corn is looking good).

This shot--Blue Mound, Minnesota (2010)--may send you scrambling back to the top because something about this one resembles the very first image, even though it's a bundle of states apart and surrounded by different climates almost. In a thematic sense, however, the Red Cloud shot at the top and at the Blue Mound shot at the bottom are, in essence, the same photograph. 

This show has gone on long enough; I'd just as soon finish the first decade of the album. One or two more from 2011 maybe, and then I'll quit and take up the cause tomorrow again: twenty years of shots of the very same subject. I'm hoping you don't get bored.

This first selection from 2011 is rather obviously not a tree, and the barbed wire feels uncomfortably of the Holocaust. But I can't help thinking this one is a relative of the others, although I'd hesitate to call it them kissing cousins.  The sky, so bountifully dramatic, is pure South Dakota.

Where the sky is as overwhelming as the open land, sometimes the spectacle of dawn flat out refuses to play second-fiddle to any land-hugging tree or anything or anybody. In a bath of color, a early morning sky simply takes over the stage. One blessed, solitary tree can't hold a candle to the drama playing up against the dome of heaven. 

An album of photographs this morning. Hope you don't mind. Even in a place most people would say is not particularly comely, a couple of random shots can still shine. 

Postings on the River

Should you choose to wonder, that river, the one in the photo, is a proud neighbor of ours, now humbled greatly by human ingenuity, by the Army Corps of Engineers, who created a series of dams that now largely controls the flow of the nation's longest river. Once upon a time, the Missouri was a blessed neighbor that had to be feared. It was once the reason most of us came, an interstate highway, as it had been for centuries for Omaha and Yankton.  It was the very means by which we could stay, the supplier of all our goods, but, still, all too often a monster. 

Once upon a time our Missouri overflowed with life. Once there were steamships here, great flatline 150 passenger cruisers piloted by wizened captains so adept at their trade they could navigate an ever-changing maze of spacious sandbars and cottonwood snares capable of crunching a steamboat as if it were cardboard. Three years--three shipping seasons--was the average life span of the monsters that once chugged along up and down this very Missouri River. 

Sioux City honors its riverboat heritage in many ways, but one of them is a wonderful walkway that lines the river with due diligence and honor. If you take the time to walk that way, you've likely seen these time-worn posts.

I couldn't help asking: might it have been possible that these old storied posts at one time held docked steamers on their trips up and down the river? It's a wonderful idea, but not true. 

Once upon a time, before the dams, those posts were driven into the river and then connected, like this:

I'm told that some of those old posts may date back to the 1890s, but were driven into the river sometime between 1930 and 1950. Once they were in place, a dredge came up, dug out the river's channels, and dumped what they dug up behind the barriers created by those posts to reclaim river bottom as land, much as the Dutch took land back from the sea.

It was all done as a deterrent to the river's eternal rowdiness. The Missouri, an old neighbor, was forever a naughty kid, far too ready to act out. 

After the dams, the case for the discipline represented by those posts was largely moot. A couple of years ago, the Missouri showed some signs of its old delinquency, but otherwise those posts do no one's bidding now but create their own riverfront museum as emblems of another time, when the city--and the whole region--could yet be described as, well, the frontier--symbols of the wild, wild west we were, on a river we could only meekly call ours. 

On your next walk along the river, don't miss 'em. They're not leaving any time soon.

Uncle Jay's story--in the living room

Years later, when I was long gone from the household and was able to watch other families in action, only then did I wonder about my own family because even though the Schaaps were remarkably free the scandals that rip families apart, we didn't get together all that often. Uncle Jay and Aunt Sis lived in Cedar Grove, fifteen minutes away. In a cold Wisconsin winter, it took longer to get a car warm than it did to get their upstairs apartment.

Uncle Gerard and Aunt Jeanette lived in the city, in Sheboygan, a half-hour away, not far at all. Three Schaap sisters ended up in Michigan. Aunt Gertrude had orange trees in her Santa Barbara backyard. We were there once. And the youngest, Agnes, lived in Rochester, New York, married to a man with a prickly personality, an in-law likely closest to an familial aberration.  He wasn't Dutch, and she met him during the war--that's all I knew. I don't remember him--what he looked like, how he talked. I don't know that I ever met him. He worked for Kodac. Upstairs in a closet we had a huge photograph he'd taken of a city at night. That's all I remember of an uncle I don't think I ever saw.

It was a loving family, preachers kids all, full of good people, sweethearts. Occasionally, we'd stop in Sheboygan to see Uncle Gerard and Aunt Jeanette. And occasionally, Dad would take me along to the barber shop in Cedar Grove, but those visits were few and far between. What we needed was a Michigan family to show up. That would get the whole bunch into our living room.

Uncle Marinus, a preacher, was a card--all I have to do is think of him and I smile. He was a real city boy, grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was capable of slinging slights at backwards Oostburg, which riled Uncle Bill, who lived in Michigan but grew up in the burg and loved even the thought of the village where I too grew up.

That Uncle Jay told the story of the Korean woman at a family reunion wasn't shocking, but it likely came as a surprise. The Schaaps loved to giggle, and by the time I was old enough to listen in, they'd all long ago determined that a great family reunion meant a healthy dose of Uncle Jay's whacky boyhood stories. Silence was his mode until one of the older sisters egged him on. The first one out required a commitment he hadn't worked up, but once he started, he would take over the reunion. The Schaap girls soon loosened up that odd falsetto laugh, and the stage was his and his alone. 

He was a master story-teller, with a satchel of stories he'd always lug along, most of them old standards he could repeat time and time again because they were outfitted so richly in detail his sisters and his brothers just loved. 

When he started in on the Korean woman, for a moment I held my breath. I don't know that anyone in the family had ever spoken so openly about a woman's naked breast, so when he started up--"So a couple of months ago, a Korean woman and her little boy--cute little guy, button nose--came into the shop". . .I was maybe slightly ill-at-ease. By this time, I'd heard the story in two versions. I knew the punch lines, and I had a hankering for what that bare Korean breast looked like. 

"There it was, right in front of me. I didn't know where to look--" he said as if the scissors and comb were there in his hands.

If he had misgivings about telling the story, they weren't in the least apparent. He'd started out the show in familiar territory with some classic winners, childhood tales most everyone already knew before venturing into new territory. Then, the Korean woman.

"And it worked, you know, because just like that the little boy stopped crying."

My aunts were small and pleasingly round. They rolled around a bit on the chairs Dad had set out in the living room, but it wasn't long and tears were spilled from laughing fits that only served to crank up the madness that took over the living room. 

Uncle Jay was coming around the far turn. "What should a barber do about the boy's hair that fell right there on his mom's bare breast--you know, if it stays there it's going to irritate some. . ."

Aunts and uncles--and Mom and Dad--were holding onto each other as if a windstorm is tearing up the lakeshore and the only way of not blowing over is holding on to each other. 

"You know, that whisk broom has really stiff bristles. I couldn't use that so I decided I had to blow that hair off. . ."

Poof, poof--he blows at a breast that, I swear, at this point in the story had magically appeared right there in our living room.

Nothing Uncle Jay could say was new. I didn't expect any new revelations. I'd heard the story twice already--once in the barber chair, once on the softball field. 

But there in our living room, the audience was different--rollicking relatives who could barely contain themselves. He and the Korean woman had turned our living room into a chicken coop--a really bad choir of falsetto laughter. 

I was twelve, maybe thirteen years old, and there was still this shocking matter of a bared woman's breast being spoken of, being joked about, right there in the sanctity of my mom and dad's living room. I'd never felt anything like it, but there, in the chorus of laughter, hard as it is to believe, I felt perfectly free to sing along.

It felt very strange to hear my uncle's story in his barber chair. I'd been embarrassed in the barber shop that day and abashed by what I heard--and didn't hear--on the third base line. Uncle Jay's barber shop is gone today, I think, and an Oostburg  town-team tradition of fast-pitch softball long ago disappeared.

Even though, today, my Schaap uncles and aunts are all gone, I know darn well my cousins will likely forget a Korean woman whose breasts they likely remember from an image they could only have created from their own imaginations--and an image of their slightly eccentric uncle pursing his lips to blow away that little boy's hair.

I'm not sure why, but by far the best rendition was the one I somehow felt part of right there in our own living room. 

____________________________ 

In the photo at the top of the page, left to right, are Uncle Gerard, Uncle Jay, my dad, and Uncle Ward. 

Uncle Jay's Story--on the third base line

I didn't know it at the time, and neither did anyone else on the team, but I grew up at the end of an era. That same summer--for me, eighth grade--town fast-pitch softball, a tradition in the village for years, was slowly walking off the field. For years afterward, my old town-team uniform--I played third base, B-team--hung downstairs in our basement. Somewhere along the line, my parents just chucked it.

The Oostburg Athletic Association, probably just two or three men, sponsored those teams. Nobody got paid. Out at the village park Oostburg teams would host ball games for most the summer-long: teams--plural. The A-team and the B-team. The A-team was men, some just about old enough to be B-team dads. The B-team was a junior varsity, the future of fast-pitch softball, although in this case I don't know that anyone played B-team town softball after we did. High school baseball, as well as plain-and-simple prosperity, wiped out summer, town-league fast-pitch softball.

It paid absolutely nothing and cost a lot of time, but it created stardom. The good hitters and fielders had as much star power as anyone in town. I'll never forget my dad's jealousy when some guy came up to me after a game and said when he saw me hit he was reminded of the way my dad used to. He was talking about my uncle, not my dad, who'd never played town softball. I never saw my uncle play, had no idea what position he held down; but I knew by collective unconscious that Uncle Allie used to park homeruns out beyond the  far center-field bandstand.

Somewhere around the B-team sixth inning, the A-team would start loosening up. We'd still be playing just ten feet away, but for the fans in the stands, the big-time stuff had only just begun.

I was on the bench because we were up to bat. The A-team--the ones with newer uniforms--were right there in front of us when some guy--I don't remember who--wondered whether anybody else had heard this great story about the Korean woman who'd flashed her tits in front of Jay Schaap--"you know, the barber in Cedar Grove. He's got that little shop on Main Street." 

I remember thinking that none of them considered they were talking about my Uncle Jay. But then, Uncle Jay didn't matter to them or to my own teammates, who couldn't help but hear. The story was what she flashed.

What was amazing to m, and I remember it yet, was that the guy was telling it right, all the stuff about the boy's hair falling on that bare breast, about Uncle Jay deciding not to use the whisk broom but to blow it off, about getting down there close enough to be sure a good whiff would leave that thing clean as a whistle. 

The shape of the story was the same, nothing exaggerated, nothing lost in translation, nothing grown into it. It was boilerplate Uncle Jay. Guys laughed, boys giggled, and no one asked me if it was true. No one was thinking it was my Uncle Jay. The point was that something super cool had happened in Uncle Jay's barber shop. To shut up her bawling kid, a young mom hauled out her tits right there in front of the barber. Can you believe that?

The softball field rendition was the second telling of the story. Uncle Jay's own embellishments were still there, but something about it seemed different. 

I didn't know the word then, but maybe the best way for me to describe the telling is that when I heard it on the softball field, it felt more prurient, more sexual, more of a guy-thing. If it hadn't been my uncle at the heart of it, I'd have loved hearing every second of the telling. I wouldn't have been embarrassed. 

What changed was the audience--no longer just my dad and me in the shop, but this time a softball team in uniform, all male, two teams. We all heard it. Right there on the third base line the audience made the story feel like something else all together.

The discomfort I felt when Uncle Jay told it in the barber shop arose from hearing it in the presence of Dad. I guess I wasn't sure that he'd ever thought much about breasts. That he was laughing was as shocking as the story itself.

But I'd been around enough ball parks enough to know the A-team thought about breasts, and I knew the B-team did. 

And they weren't breasts, they were tits. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"To be blessed"

Blessed is he. . .whose delight is in the law of the Lord, Psalm 1

Apparently, there’s some question about the first word of the book of the Psalms. There’s little question about the word itself, of course; it’s “blessed,” at least in most translations.

The long-standing question about the word is grammatical. Is blessed, as used in Psalm 1:1, an adjective or a noun? Does the word describe a condition, or is it a condition its own right?

I taught English my whole professional life, but on this one I don’t have a clue. I like the question however. It’s clearly a win/win. Is blessedness an attribute—as in “hers is a truly blessed life”— or a condition—as in “he is blessed"?

This poem from the Writers Almanac is titled, simply enough, "The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog," and the poet is Alicia Suskind Ostryker, who someone once called "America's most fiercely honest poet." (Keep that in mind.)

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

I'm not at all sure what to make of that metaphor, but it is at the very least memorable--"milk washing through a cow"? Ms. Ostryker was born and reared in Brooklyn, but she's pushing ninety years old and not a dummy. Besides, she took a Ph.D. from the University of the Dairy State, that's right--Wisconsin. She should know milk doesn't just wash through a cow, right? Note, however, that the milkmaid's odd metaphor-making comes in answer to the same question that rises from Psalm 1--that blessedness follows, oddly enough, from a diligent life, and that her answer clearly and vividly asserts that the milk is "God's love."

There's more.

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

There's a pattern here. She's taking the personae of a few unlikely subjects and allowing them to talk about what it means to be blessed. The dark red tulip could well hail from Orange City, but then again probably not, given her "slug of lust" and that "up-ended skirt." 

But, you get the pattern. Both the aging milkmaid and the dark red tulip define blessedness by their task, their calling. 

And one more.

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

Okay. "America's most fiercely honest poet" won't let anything escape testimony, so for her final stanza she asks a dog, a generic dog, who answers her question by referencing that abominable behavior common to all dogs, the means by which their snouts identify each other. To be blessed, that mutt says, is to have a pinch of God within you that's both unique and accessible, to have one's own identity.

Okay, it's not Psalm 1. About that there is no dispute. Maybe it helps to describe Alicia Suskin Ostriker as a Jewish feminist, because she is. To be blessed, say a milkmaid, a tulip, and a generic dog with "a pinch of God" is to be what you are, to know it and to be it. Psalm 1 says to be blessed means to "take delight in the law of the Lord." 

Can someone who is not true to him or herself "take delight in the law of the Lord?"

Hmmm. Maybe Alicia Suskin Ostriker--and her curious witnesses--isn't all that far afield. It's not out of the question.

Uncle Jay's Barber Shop

Dad wasn't bald, but he never had much hair. I don't know where he got his hair cut regularly, but I remember that a trip to Cedar Grove, just down the pike a ways, was rare, which I thought--even when I was just a kid--just a little odd. Uncle Jay had a little barber shop on Main, fifteen minutes away--one chair--no waiting, or so it seemed to me, but we didn't go all that often.

He'd put a plank across the arms of the barber chair and set me down there when I was a little shyster. He had an electric razor or two, but I don't remember the buzz as much as the patterned swish his scissors made when he'd pull a hank of my hair to shorten it. By the time I cared how my hair looked, I don't remember going to Uncle Jay's, but I have no reason to believe that he did anything less than a stellar job. But he worked slowly--that I remember because he loved telling stories.

Uncle Jay was more portly than Dad and had more hair. He wore it plastered down like Capone, but nothing about him made me uneasy or fearful. Whether I was in the chair or awaiting my turn, the two of them would talk. In fact, I don't remember him ever talking to me.

But Uncle Jay was a story-teller. At family reunions, he could own the living room because once he got going, it was story after story of the Schaap family at one church or another (Grandpa was a preacher). He'd recite shenanigans in such detail they made me nervous, little stories of naughty boys, my Dad among 'em. The relatives loved it. Once you got him going, Uncle Jay was the beloved highlight. Maybe a few hymns too, and some good, solid spiritual talk. But if we could get him to talk, Uncle Jay was the main course.

Dad didn't pull that storytelling chain when we were in Uncle Jay's barber chair, but one story I remember. I was in the chair, maybe eighth grade or so, old enough to feel the push and pull of some inward yearning I couldn't quite yet identify. It was something that had happened right there, in the shop, when an Asian woman, Korean, I'm guessing, because some local boys had come back from service with Korean wives. She'd brought her little boy in for a haircut, Jay said, first time he'd seen either of them.

The kid didn't wasn't wild about the barber, but, like photographers, barbers have tricks to keep their itty-bitty customers from bawling. That Uncle Jay wouldn't have developed a repetoire wouldn't surprise me. The only customers I'd ever seen in the chair, other than the Oostburg Schaaps, were silver-haired.

Anyway, this boy, not liking his first haircut, cried and cried some more. Uncle Jay looked at my dad to make sure he was listening. Mom got up from the worn chair and spoke her own magic words to her little boy, in Korean, of course, but mom's soothsaying had no immediate effect. 

I'm sitting there in Uncle Jay's chair, a kid myself back then, but at the age when forces far beyond my power were at work, sharpened in me, I can't help but think, by a Calvinist culture that loved singing  seven whole senses' worth of "Be careful little eyes what you see."

So I'm getting a haircut, in the chair, and my Uncle Jay, as he does frequently, stops what he's doing, looks into the wall-size mirror behind him and speaks to the image of my dad. This time, what he says gets my attention.

This Korean mom, he claims, comes up to her little boy, "stands right here beside him while I'm still cutting his hair," he says. She opens her shirt or blouse and pulls out one breast, pulls it right out and slaps her nipple into that little jigger's mouth. In the mirror, I can see him mimic the sucking. Honestly.

The little boy stops crying, Uncle Jay says. In the mirror he's saying all of this. I can't see Dad. Thank goodness he can't see me. 

Uncle Jay is giggling himself. He's at his finest. 

I don't know where to look. I don't know that a female breast had ever been referred to or spoken of before. With my friends, sure, but not with my Dad and my uncle. It blew me away to think my dad was sitting right there and seeing a woman's breast in his mind was almost beyond the pale. 

Uncle Jay was already in road gear. See, it wasn't just that bare naked breast that got aired, but there was this matter of clean up. The little boy's cut hair come to rest right there on that white breast. He had a whisk broom he often used, he said, but it seemed wrong to some stiff brush. Dad was giggling, both of them obligious to an adolescent boy sitting there, hearing the whole lurid tale.

Uncle Jay decided he'd just blow off the hair off that bared breast. So down he goes, mimicking. He purses his lips and blows lightly--"puff, puff." My dad was in full guffaw now, and I was totally abashed, thankful for that mirror. I was flat-out embarrassed to hear my dad and my uncle talk about boobs. I was too young and too much of a Calvinist kid to laugh, and I was shocked they did.

We didn't go to Uncle Jay for haircuts very often. Just once in a while we'd go, when Dad decided it was time again to visit his older brother. I don't know why he didn't make it a practice, but he didn't.

And me? I'll never forget the day I sat there in the chair and would have, if I could have, quietly just slipped out beneath Jay's story and Dad's guffaws, to go find someplace to sit and think about the story I'd just heard, about that woman pulling out her breast right there in front of my uncle Jay.

My word. 

There's more this story.

10) Love your enemies

I don't know that Tish Warren gave much thought to order among these volunteered resolutions, but I can't help but think it makes sense to finish up the list with a resolution that is humanly impossible. It comes from John Inazu, who wrote Confident Pluralism, and who, therefore, one might expect to say what he did: "Pray for political leaders — especially ones you don’t like," a resolution in the same vein as a biblical mandate also all too sufficient to turn you inside out: "Love your enemies." Yeah, sure.

An old friend once explained grace to me in this way. "I got to believe," he said, that if there's an elevator to heaven, when I'm standing there waiting on the third floor or whatever, and the door opens on the way up, it could be Adolf Hitler standing there, on his way to glory."

Something like that. You get the point: Grace--real, 100% grace, means that someday I could possibly play a heavenly round of golf with Hitler or Eichmann or Mengele.

I've never forgotten that blasted mustache behind the sliding door, because, I suppose, the idea has to be right, even though seeing him there makes me wonder, momentarily at least, whether I want to go on up. I can't help thinking if that, on some dewy heavenly morning, one of them shows up at the course when I do, I'll stay out on putting green just to miss being thrown into a foursome I'd despise.

“Think about our political leaders and pray for the ones you don’t like," Inazu says. "But make them prayers of gratitude: for the things they do well, for the people whose lives they help improve, for the ways they contribute to human flourishing. And if you can’t come up with anything, ask yourself if it’s because they need to change or because you need to change.”

Owwwwiches!

I don't know that Jeremiah could have come up with a more deadly stinger. "Love your enemies?" Give me a break. Pray for the man who blest us with the Big Lie? the man who, single-handedly, is bringing on what could well be a democratic apocalypse? Give thanks for how Donald E. Trump is contributing these days to "human flourishing"? 

Tish Warren's number 10 is, on its own, as good reason as any to laugh off New Years Resolutions altogether, as most of us eventually do. I should commit myself to praying for Donald Trump? Inazu can't be serious. 

Tell you what--on the day Trump prays for Democrats, I'll pray for him. How's that?Let's make a deal here. Mike Pence may be praying for the Donald. Maybe Lyndsey Graham and probably Steven Miller. Steve Bannon?--sure. Jim Jordan, that Gosar cuckoo bird from Arizona. Kevin McCarthy should spend time on knees for the Orange Man, if he isn't already.

But me?

Can't be done. Humanly impossible. 

But then, I guess that's the point, isn't it?

9) Make a plan to seek racial justice and healing

Sadly enough, what seemed so clear to me is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so forth and so forth and so forth, an almost inexorable chain of events. 

Begin here. I have no desire to be unkind to Oklahomans, but what needs to be said is that its white founding fathers were not of New England Puritan stock. Many of its pioneers were the rough-hewn stuff of Western legend. Oklahoma, once called Indian Territory, was home to more than its share of tough hombres.

After the war, scores of ex-slaves left the cotton-picking south following the dreams of the West, just thousands of others up north. In Oklahoma, those emigres were Southerners especially, many of whom had never touted Abraham Lincoln. What's more, they considered his "emancipation" talk astutely unnatural because it was clear to them that Lincoln had never had to live with. . .well you know, the n-word. 

By 1890, the Five Civilized Tribes who'd suffered through the Trail of Tears assessed their plight in Indian Territory and signed on to the provisions of the Dawes Act (1887), which offered land ownership to Native people if they would give up their tribal governance and associations. The effect, in Oklahoma as elsewhere, was to free up land for thousands more white pioneers, many of whom were embittered Southerners not so much leaving Dixie behind as lugging their losses, theirt grievances and their bigotry with them.

Memorial flowers at Gathering Place

Thus, while freed slaves moving into the region expected freedom in Indian Territory--the movers and shakers in city hall were, often as not, ex-Rebs who were not particularly interested the "equality" (whatever that meant!) for, well, the n-word once again.

What's perfectly understandable is that, thus, a city like Tulsa, before the oil strikes, was the very model of segregation in the late 19th century, maybe not as blatant as it was in the Jim Crow South, but as segregated as any devised by apartheid South Africans. There was Tulsa--the white world--and there was Greenwood--the black. It was very simple, and the lines were very clearly drawn.

Segregation or not, those ex-slaves not only survived, they flourished. Right there on the streets of Greenwood, their city, they did well, did better than well, in fact, so much so that some people called the place Black Wall Street.  

Then something happened. 

For a moment in time, the old South-level hate threatened the barriers already set between the races in Tulsa: to white folks, what a black boy did to a white girl was an abomination, worthy of death. Furthermore, the lynching of a white man had occurred recently, an event at which the Sheriff and the police chief had condemned the mob violence but made it clear that the hanging had been a benefit to life in the city. In other words, lynching didn't seem barbaric.

It all seems so perfectly understandable: this happened, then that happened--a series of almost inevitable cause and effect sequences. Thus, when crowds of white men, 2000 strong, were milling around the courthouse where the "Diamond Dick" Rowland, the kid who touched the white girl, was held, dozens of African-Americans in Greenwood, some of them vets who'd only recently returned from the Great War, determined that what seemed inevitable was, this time, not going to happen. The African-Americans went, single-file, to the courthouse and offered their protection to the Sheriff, who just waved them off. 

Tulsa had become a tinderbox. On May 31, at 10:30 at night, a white man attempted to disarm an African-American World War I vet. A shot was fire, and thus it began. 

It was all so clearly a matter of this cause and that effect, that cause and this effect--it was so perfectly understandable. 

And so horribly evil.

For years, no one talked about it. It wasn't in any Chamber of Commerce picture books, of course, but neither was it in any school kid's local history text or class. For years, no one brought up the Tulsa-Greenwood Massacre. Even today, no one knows exactly what to call it.

No one ever got a dime in reparation for the nearly 400 homes and businesses destroyed in what was not a race riot but a massacre. No one ever received a dime for reparations, a word so many white people can't stand to hear.

Tulsa's Gathering Place is 66-acre riverside park dedicated and designed to create activities for a diverse community. During the 100-year commemoration of the 1921 racial conflict, it was the centerpiece of activities. 

But the sign (above)--I was given one--was meant to register defiance because a park is not reparations.

The ninth bit of advice Tish Warren listed in that op-ed about New Years Resolutions is something I don't need a resolution to fulfill: "Make a plan to seek racial justice and healing." Most of what you just read appeared here in six months ago. 

I'm not young, not looking for new fields to conquer. I'm no longer an idealist; there are too many miles on the register of my experience. 

But I can crow from my little corner of the world, and I plan to. I will. 

That's a resolution I don't have to make.